Wedge Rider, Newport Beach, California
Posted on 11/16/2005 2:38:35 PM PST by PatrickHenry
I now realize that there was a biology teacher in Dover named Jennifer Miller who was a witness. I got confused by the similarity of her name with Kenneth Miller, a plaintiff's witness. The bracketed insert of [Ken?] was from me, thinking I was correcting the court reporter's typo. The error is mine.
1. it reads as though much of this closing was written months before the trial.
2. The TMLC strategy is glaringly apparent: they are borrowing the Clintonian strategy of "triangulation" and setting up "creationism" as the religious idea that can't be allowed into government schools, Evolution as the standard, boring old fashioned science, and then trying to characterize ID as though it were some sort of bleeding edge science, and that the Dover SChool District is just trying to give their students a "jump" on the latest science developments. Funny, I don't recall the Dover School board falling over itself in a rush to include a statement to be read in Physics class about the viability of String Theory.
The laughable point is the idea that the morons on the Dover School Board are somehow better equipped to divine bleeding edge science theory than, say, the undergrad curriculum committees of the best Universities in the world, none of which teach courses in ID.
YEC INTREP - read later
I think it's a problem regarding the overall theme of the arguments. The plaintiffs' side had one long coherent claim -- what the school board did was inherently of a religious nature, and all the evidence shows it. So they essentially told one story. That's the ideal way to argue -- pick one "theory of the case" and stick to it.
The defense has to cover all the same testimony, but negate that overall theme. They have to say: "Yes, X said ..., but that doesn't mean anything. And Y said ..., but what Y was really saying was ... " etc. Rebutting a dozen different items is inevitably going to be more choppy than tying them all together. Especially when they really do tie together so nicely.
You have begun to understand the Wedge. It's the start of true enlightenment.
This man, and the ID/Creationists have obviously not read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
What about teaching ID as "the controversy"? This is a sham for introducing ID as being on an equal basis. ID says there is a controversy about evolution--a controversy they have contrived that is peculiarly focused on biology. Let's extend this to all "controversies" we can imagine:
I do not believe in the Pythagorean Theorem--there are gaps in the proof, I do not accept your proof, and I think triangles can have more than 180 degrees. Obviously God designed triangles, and my belief in God trumps geometry. This "controversy" will help all students who fail their geometry tests!
I do not believe in gravity. We accept that gravity makes apples on earth fall, but it is angels that push the planets around. Saying otherwise is merely circular reasoning. Teach the controversy.
Why are students required to believe in atoms and molecules? There is not a single mention of them in the Bible, nor in the Declaration of Independence. Electrons and atomic forces promote atheism and moral relativism in the public schools. Teach the controversy.
I've never been confident about airplanes staying up. Some say that it is due to secular engineering. NASA and Boeing engineers are of the elite. Who would believe them? I suspect fairies. Teach the controversy.
"Jane Cleaver is the same. She has an eighth-grade education."[emphasis added]
I assume she's one of the defendants; i.e., a member of the Dover School Board.
Who in their right mind would rely on a person with an eigth grade education to determine what is and is not a valid scientific theory, or worse still, what the definition of science ought to be? Her scientific knowledge clearly isn't the basis for her decision regarding the ID statement, so what then is it that informs her that she and her fellow Dover School board members should go tampering with the definition of science so as to include supernatural causation? Perhaps her own beliefs in the "supernatural"?
Wedge Rider, Newport Beach, California
Considering that the locals elected new board members who are against ID, do you think this might be a bad argument to use?
But I also think we have a skills mismatch here and ID got outgunned.
I was especially impressed by the way the defense summation skipped over the perjury of its own clients. That will impress the judge favorably.
"...the law prescribes improper purpose..."
I assume they meant "proscribes".....
That is really no different than any other extended trial. all the witnesses had been deposed and everyone knew in advance pretty much what the testimony would be.
You think the closing argument by the plaintiff wasn't written months ago?
Seems a bit more like a credibility mismatch to me. The lawyer doesn't have much choice but to work with what he's given, and ID doesn't have much to give..
Could be an error by the court reporter. Transcripts are full of little things like that.
As Fuller has explained, it is merely a philosophical commitment to so-called methodological naturalism, adopted as a convention by the bulk of the scientific community, which bars reference to the possibility of supernatural causation, again, at least so far as such causation is currently regarded as supernatural. Even Pennock agrees that philosophers of science, those who have examined these matters in detail, do not agree as to the viability or benefits of this so-called methodological commitment.Can any of you creationists show me ONE breakthrough theory in science that has EVER been successful, that relied on the existence of the supernatural???Moreover, the evidence shows that this philosophical, nonscientific commitment is in no way an essential feature of scientific inquiry. One should be reluctant, truly loathed to impose as a matter of federal law a current convention of the scientific community when the consequences would be to greatly harm scientific progress, at least if the history of science can shed any light on its future. But that would be the practical effect of accepting the artificially narrow view of science espoused by the plaintiffs' experts.
It's interesting to see that Gillen thinks Fuller, with his postmodernist defense of ID, was their only expert witness worth mentioning.
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