Intelligent Design shutdown

There has been a lot of news lately about the recent court decision regarding Intelligent Design. In Pennsylvania, U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that teaching Intelligent Design was injecting religion into public schools. This reverses the Dover area school board's previous decision to include stickers in biology text books (more in a moment) and equal time teaching Intelligent Design as a competing theory. I fully support the Judges decision, but first, a few words on the previous decision by the Dover school board.

Placing a sticker in a biology textbook that claims evolution is “a theory, not a fact” is disingenuous. If it has to be stated that evolution is a theory, in this way, shouldn't they also be clamoring for physics texts to includes stickers warning students that gravity is also just a theory? Including this sticker suggests the idea that there is a vast controversy among scientists about evolution theory when there just isn't. This is a laughable idea. There is a fringe group of scientists working on competing theories, but no where near the numbers needed or the amount of respect for such competing theories to justify it being taught in schools.

There is an argument that we should teach both theories and let students decide. Fortunately, it's not up to a collective of students to rule on the state of scientific theories. Equal time for one a competing theory of evolution won't be justified until it gains equal respect in the scientific community. It won't gain any respect until it can demonstrate a testable hypothesis and useful predictions.

In my mind, this quote from Jones solidifies his responsible handling of the case:

“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 thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions”