Posted on 10/07/2005 7:23:15 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
To keep this all in one daily thread, here are links to two articles in the York Daily Record (with excerpts from each), which has been doing a great job of reporting on the trial:
Forrest cross-examination a rambling wonder.
About the time that Richard Thompson, head law guy at the Thomas More center and chief defender of the Dover Area School Board, started his third year of cross-examination of philosopher Barbara Forrest, it was easy to imagine that at that moment, everyone in the courtroom, including Forrest, who doesn’t believe in God, was violating the separation of church and court by appealing to God for it to please, Lord, just stop.It wouldn’t have been so bad if there was a point to the ceaseless stream of questions from Thompson designed to elicit Lord knows what. He’d ask her the same question 18 different times, expecting, I guess, a different answer at some point. And he never got it.
Thompson, who said he’s a former prosecutor, should have known better. Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and expert on the history of the intelligent design creationist movement, was a lot smarter than, say, some poor, dumb criminal defendant.
Here is a summation of Forrest’s testimony: She examined the history of the intelligent design movement and concluded that it’s simply another name for creationism. And what led her to that conclusion? The movement leader’s own words. They started out with a religious proposition and sought to clothe it in science. The result was similar to putting a suit on your dog.
[anip]
Thompson was in the midst of asking Forrest whether she had heard a bunch of things that some people had said to indicate, well, to indicate whether she’d heard a bunch of things that some people had said, I guess, when the topic came up.
Thompson asked whether she had ever heard a statement by some guy — frankly, this one caught me off-guard and I didn’t catch the guy’s name — who said that belief in evolution can be used to justify “cross-species sex.”
This came on the same day that Thompson grilled Forrest about her opposition to the so-called Santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that seemed to encourage, sort of, the teaching of intelligent design. Our U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum is a friend of the intelligent design people.
He also has a strange obsession with bestiality, commenting that court decisions that uphold the right to privacy would lead to — naturally, and you know you were thinking it — man-on-dog sex.
Dover science teachers testified that they fought references to intelligent design.
Defense attorney Richard Thompson [he represents the school board] said differing opinions on whether teachers and administration worked in cooperation to create the Dover Area School District’s statement on intelligent design comes down to perspective.
wit
Nope.
I will suggest to you that waving the bloody shirt of religous extremism of centuries well gone by, is tiresome.
Automatically writing yourself into that history as being on the side of the good is worse. The 20th century saw the murder of between 50 and 100 million people by secular governments. Governments that swore to protect their people from the evils of religion, among other things. Governments that outlawed religion. Personally I am more frightened by those that hate religion than the religious. I might have felt differently in the 15th century, and differently again in he 12th century, but hey I live in the 21st century. As far as your demands for proof. That is funny you offer none whatsover for you views, you simply defame religious people in the name of an incomplete and highly edited historical perspective. Than you wave your arm and demand the names of ten scientists that have published serious articles with numerous qualifiers supplied by you. You haven't done it and neither will I. In any case your entire response was just littered with bad prose lurid imagery of people being burned at the stake, etc. and isn't worthy of a line by line refutation
Why?
Not directly, as in saying, "That Behe is a charlatan!" It has been noted, however, that many of his writings reflect poorly upon him in the sense of revealing ignorance of his subject matter, etc.
Surely more than enough to qualify him as an expert on the question of how Intelligent Design is related to religion.
;-)
Which reminds me, have I mentioned what Dembski reportedly said on the topic?
"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski, one of the movement's chief proponents, said in a 1999 interview in Touchstone, a Christian magazine that Forrest cited in her testimony.[emphasis added]
The only open question is whether or not Dembski was telling the truth when he said that (I discount the possibility that the quote is inaccurate, since the defense surely would have presented rebuttal evidence to that effect were it case, which they haven't.)
As for Dembski's truthfulness about the faith-based origins of ID, all I can say is that while he arguably might have a motive to suppress the connection (to get the subject into schools), I can think of no corresponding reason for him to claim ID has faith-based origins if that weren't the case. What, pray tell, would he gain by claiming that if it were not true?
Science is not religion. It is not discussed in the same terms as religion. Science can be wrong for decades. Nevetheless, it relentlessly converges upon an increasingly accurate model of nature. That's what the course corrections and revisions do. It's worked so far.
Against that, all the dogmatic religions in the world save possibly one--but I wouldn't bet on that and, anyway, who knows WHICH one?--are wrong now and will be wrong forever.
Ahhhh; you, too, have been touched by His Noodly Appendage!
Ramen! (Arrrrrr; shivver me timbers! Avast ye pasta-challenged infidels!)
It sounds like it would be very time-consuming but also interesting. Maybe someone more qualified than I would rise to the challenge.
Wrong again. Can't you get anything right?
Thanks, but I'm too lazy to revise The List-O-Links right now. I've put in way too much time on the new clickable index. I've noted, however, that my old link is dead.
No, of course not. You're from West Virginia. Gotta make allowances.
You are always so serious.
Thanks for reminding me. Please tell Darwin Central I need an increase in my allowance.
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