Re: Judge Jones sided with the Discovery Institute and ruled against the Dover school board policy.

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> Love it!  ~ Janice :)
> Linked from:
> <a href="http://www.mrdawntreader.com/the_dawn_treader/2005/12/so_they_went_an.html" eudora="autourl" target="_blank">
> http://www.mrdawntreader.com/the_dawn_treader/2005/12/so_they_went_an.html</a>
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> <b>Dover Ruling </b>  December 2005
> "....Judge Jones sided with
> <a href="http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2341">
> the Discovery Institute</a> and ruled against the Dover school board
> policy.  No promotion of biological design  in public school
> science classrooms.
> A better approach, in my opinion, is to allow biological design to
> flourish as a metascience as
> <a href="http://www.mrdawntreader.com/the_dawn_treader/2005/08/intelligent_des.html">
> Dr. Robin Collins suggests here.</a> As a metascience, biological design
> will receive the time and support it needs to mature and
> flourish.
> Scientists make wonderful pragmatists and lousy philosophers. 
> Philosophical arguments about science will not convince them to switch
> away from their current research paradigms.  In order to gain
> traction and acceptance, design based research programs need to produce
> more discoveries, more break throughs and more cures.  Research
> grants will follow, and so will more scientists. 
> <b>One interesting area to keep a close eye on is the oxymoronic research
> area known as <i>directed evolution. </b> </i>It may prove to be an
> interesting testing ground of paradigms (design -vs- chance).  I
> hope to post more on this interesting subject as I learn more about
> it. 
> A second area where I think design based programs may yield superior
> results is in forensic biology.  Just a hunch.
> <b>Once biological design gains traction in the scientific community,</b>
> and I have every reason to expect it will, then <b>you will see a more
> interesting trial than the one we witnessed in Dover.
> </b>Update: Some legal and philosophical analysis of the case from an
> expert over at
> <a href="http://www.davidopderbeck.com/archives/2005/12/dover_id_decisi.html">
> Through A Glass Darkly</a>.

 1) "Intelligent design as a metascience" is fine as long as we realize that its a specifically theistic metascience, thus religious, thus not something that should be appealed to by a science that operates in accord with methodological naturalism, which just gets us back to where we started: Intelligent design can be good theology but it's bad science.

& on this distinction, the essay by physics Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell in the 14 November issue of Time is quite good.

2) Scientists may make lousy philosophers but they generally don't compare in badness with philosophers telling scientists how to do science. Comte & the supposed impossibility of knowing stellar compositions is a prime example. If you want to know how science works, look at what scientists - both experimental & theoretical - do. Philosophers of science come in afterwards, after scientific successes & failures have occurred, & clean things up & make them look more respectable for their fellow philosophers. & if what's worked isn't in accord with current ideas about the philosophy of science, so much the worse for those ideas.

George L. Murphy
Received on Wed Dec 28 14:35:24 2005