Category: Courts

November 6, 2005

God didn’t put a man on the moon or wipe out a majority of the world’s diseases. Science did. Praying didn’t increase crop yields which allows us to raise much more food than we really need on low amount of acreage. Science did. Going to church isn’t going to help us find a cure for AIDS. Science will.

The recent defense of Evolution in Dover wasn’t some conspiracy of secular humanists bent on corrupting “our children” but was conducted by believers who find the truth of science to be much more important than their religious beliefs.

November 2, 2005

Well it had to happen. As the trial in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District comes to a close this week, the defendants are doing everything they can to save themselves from losing the case. This includes changing their testimony, selective memory, and the ever useful – attacking the media. The plaintiffs in the case also questioned the school board on their hiring of the Thomas More Law Center to represent them. The center states as one of their missions: Defending and promoting the religious freedom of Christians.

October 21, 2005

The cross examination of Behe highlights what is so wrong about Intelligent Design and the zeal of its supporters to get it wedged into school curriculums. They simply dismiss anything that doesn’t support their conclusions or they cry about being victims of politics.

Further on in testimony the discussion talked about one of the main charges ID’ers make against Evolution – that Evolution can’t be observed. ID’ers point out you can observe the “design”.

Michael Behe was asked if intelligent design is observable. Behe said it is. But when asked if he had witnessed newly designed structures appearing in the past five years. Behe said the designed structures that he’s written about are much older.

October 19, 2005

First up was Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of “Darwin’s Black Box,” who is considered an expert on Intelligent Design (ID). He has written that “intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose,” but when asked to name the driving force behind the concept, Behe could not.

Contrast that with Evolution. Darwin named “natural selection” as its driving force.

October 14, 2005

Evolution is the scientific concept describing adaptation of organisms and how that leads to changes. Those organisms that don’t adapt or adapt incorrectly go extinct. It really says nothing about “how life begins”. That charge is simply a strawman created by religionists. The changes that evolution describes is backed up with evidence and hundreds of years of research. ID is not being kept from the table, it just hasn’t presented itself properly.

October 6, 2005

The most interesting bit from Barbara Forrest’s time on the stand was the introduction of an early draft of the text book “Of Pandas and People” that the Dover district included as a reference in their disclaimer about Evolution. The early drafts show that all the publisher did was replace all instances of the word “creationism” with the phrase “Intelligent Design”.