Dover court throws out Intelligent Design

You’ve already heard about it, no doubt. I just wanted to highlight a few quotes. The first, from Judge John Jones’s ruling:

We find that the secular purposes claimed by the (school board) amount to a pretext for the (school board’s) real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause. [Link]

Contrast that with this amazing reaction to the ruling:

Former school board member William Buckingham defended the ID policy. “I’m still waiting for a judge or anyone to show me anywhere in the Constitution where there’s a separation of church and state,” he told the Associated Press. [Link]

So the agenda is pretty clear. Now this:

John West, an official at the Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of intelligent design, called the opinion “a real overreach by an activist judge who thinks he can stop the spread of a scientific idea through government-imposed censorship.” [Link]

This coming from the camp that believes in bypassing the normal scientific process – peer-review, gaining acceptance in the scientific community, then teaching the ideas to students of science – by petitioning administrative authorities to mandate teaching of ID in schools.

The suit was filed after the Dover school board told teachers to read a statement to high school biology students that said, among other things, that the evolution was a theory, not a fact, and that intelligent design was a competing explanation.

The statement encouraged students to keep “an open mind” and referred them an intelligent design book called “Of Pandas and People”. After science teachers refused to read the statement, administrators read it to students instead. [Link]

The Judge had this to say about the ‘open mind’ rider that had been attached to the evolution lesson:

This disclaimer, Judge Jones ruled after a six-week long non-jury trial, impermissibly and unconstitutionally “singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resources, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.” [Link]

Catch them young! By hook or by crook, we will have all these kids believing in God. If someone asks, we’ll say, ‘Teach the controversy!’

He (Judge Jones) also dismissed the idea that science classes should teach the controversy over intelligent design as a way to promote critical thought. “The goal of the intelligent design movement is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with intelligent design,” he wrote. [Link]