Archives for December 2005

December 22, 2005

The Holy Zoo

The Vatican has a comedian?

Spain protested to the Vatican on Thursday after a comedian from a church-controlled radio station made a spoof telephone call to Bolivia's president-elect pretending to be the Spanish prime minister.

I don't get it.

In more important Vatican news, the Holy See has granted permission to German researchers to inspect its former (abandoned in 1967) "Index of Forbidden Books." Preliminary feedback from the researchers reveals some interesting selections, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, and a book on manners, by Adolph Knigge. Mein Kampf failed to approach the level of insidiousness necessary to make the list.

posted by scott pilutik at December 22, 2005 09:22 PM

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December 20, 2005

WHERE IS YOUR INTELLIGENT DESIGNER NOW?! HA HA HA HA HA

Huge victory for the forces of reason today in Dover. I'm supposed to be writing my paper, but had to stop and smell the roses and share some of the scathingness. The blistering, brilliant 139 page opinion is almost unbelievably enlightened, but the deathknell for ID arrives on page 64:

Whether ID is Science

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16 centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any cclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth. In deliberately omitting theological or “ultimate” explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of “meaning” and “purpose” in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.

And this was equally priceless:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

The Discovery Institute, who were not a party, but stood the most to lose, are pretending that everything is just fine and that federal district court rulings don't really matter anyway.

In the larger debate over intelligent design, this decision will be of minor significance," added Discovery Institute attorney Casey Luskin.

Yeah, you keep thinking that.

Big champagne cork popping shoutouts to Panda's Thumb (where Timothy Sandefur digs deep into the opinion), PZ Myers, Ed Brayton, and Chris Mooney for ably representing the forces of reason against this frighteningly sophisticated attack. Congrats and thanks.

posted by scott pilutik at December 20, 2005 01:31 PM

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