Re: Judge Jones sided with the Discovery Institute and ruled against the Dove...

On 1/11/06, Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>
>
> That would be a perfectly legitimate secular intellectual enterprise, but
> since an emphasis on "fine tuning" is part of ID (a part, admittedly, that
> the many creationist supporters of ID want to forget about b/c it requires
> one to assume the general validity of the big bang), Judge Jones says
> that's
> now out of bounds.
>
> The trial is just one more piece of evidence, to me, that our current
> notion of what counts as public education in this nation is part of the
> problem, not part of the solution.
>
> Ted
>
> The problem that I see it is that the anti-evolutionism of ID has spoiled
this for everybody who does not want the public schools to be a bully pulpit
for atheism. As Ted noted here, biological ID has also spoiled cosmological
ID. As a result, discussions about the weak and strong anthropic principles
probably cannot be discussed as openly in the public schools say as last
week's Nature<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7072/full/439010a.html>.
The upcoming El Tejon
case<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5148976>appears
to even threaten discussing such matters in a humanities class.

The time has come to cut our losses and abandon completely ID -- at least
the part which is anti-evolution. Just as the Dover School Board destroyed
ID by being too close to YEC, the same holds for us (the us being
evolutionary creationists and theistic evolutionists) if we don't
immediately and completely disavow ID. While I share Ted's goals I don't
believe they are now attainable.

The best we can do is to embrace the weak methodological naturalism embodied
in the Kitzmiller decision. For example, we can support policies that oppose
"contrived dualism". Since ID and ontological naturalism share this trait
both would not be allowed in the science classroom. Furthermore, weak
methodological naturalism (thanks George for your nomenclature that was very
helpful) also dispels the presumption that science is the be all, end all of
truth. In fact, I contend that the teaching the self-imposed limitations of
science does a better job than ID in achieving the goals we have in common
with ID, viz. concern over the growing secularization of the culture and the
public schools. I'll defer to David the lawyer here that given current
jurisprudence we cannot keep atheism out of the schools through the courts.
Therefore, we need to find the common ground because if we fight we will
lose even more ground. My approach also has the advantage of avoiding the
impression that we desire to impose a theocracy that the legal approach
gives.
Received on Wed Jan 11 10:56:36 2006