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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Science 1, Jeebofascists 0
Posted by Jill | 12:03 PM

The judge in the Dover, PA Intelligent Design case has made his ruling (Acrobat required), and it's a good one. Excerpts:

The testimony at trial stunningly revealed that Buckingham and Bonsell tried to hide the source of the donations because it showed, at the very least, the extraordinary measures taken to ensure that students received a creationist alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.


Despite this collective failure to understand the concept of ID, which six Board members nonetheless felt was appropriate to add to ninth grade biology class to improve science education, the Board never heard from any person or organization with scientific expertise about the curriculum change, save for consistent but unwelcome advices from the District's science teachers who uniformly opposed the change....the only outside organizations which the Board consulted prior to the vote were the Discovery Institute and the TMLC, and it is clear that the purpose of these contacts was to obtain legal advice, as opposed to science education information....Nor did anyone on the Board ever contact the NAS, the AAAS, the National Science Teachers' Association, the National Association of Biology Teachers, or any other organization for information about ID or science education before or after voting for the curriculum change.


...Board members and teachers opposing the curriculum change and its implementation have been confronted directly. First, Casey Brown testified that following her opposition to the curriculum change on October 18, 2004, Buckingham called her an atheist and Bonsell told her that she would go to hell.


Although Defendants attempt to persuade this court that that each Board member who voted for the curriculum change did so for the secular purposed (sic) of of improving science education and to exercise critical thinking skills, their contentions are simply irreconcilable with the record evidence. Their asserted purposes are a sham, and they are accordingly unavailing, for the reasons that follow.


Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment clause.


To briefly reiterate, we first note that since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID policy is the advancement of religion.


Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption that is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to belief in a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified taht the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in relgion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-respected scientific propositions.


And here's the kicker:

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 came 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.
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