Re: [asa] Dover trial

I suspect that the DI will wait until it has what it thinks is a suitable test case and then try again, this time throwing all its players into the ring. This case will now have Kitzmiller hanging over it, though.

One downside is that their most receptive audience are overtly creationist school boards. It creates a bit of a catch-22 in my mind. They need to create a climate where there are willing school boards, but they need to find the right sort of willing school board, which is another matter altogether. In the climate they created, it was only a matter of time before an anti-evolutionary school board took the DI at their word and pushed for ID as a "scientific alternative" - but without a good grasp of how to hide their true intentions.

The most certain method would be a school board that the DI "intelligently designs" from the ground up, of course.

Dennis

On 27/08/09 12:20 PM, "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:

Bernie (et al.),

I changed the heading for this thread for obvious reasons.

The DI had little choice other than to distance themselves from the Dover case -- on the one hand. The Dover school board went directly against legal advice from TDI, when they adopted that particular policy. It wasn't so much that they couldn't win that case, although they knew that wouldn't be easy; it was more that it just wasn't the kind of case they wanted. They knew it was a problem from the get go, with the close local association between a board that wanted to teach YEC before being persuaded to adopt an alternative approach.

On the other hand, as defense counsel Richard Thompson has noted subsequently, TDI has encouraged schools to put some aspects of ID into science classes, through journal articles or other publications by TDI authors. A specific example would be an article by Steve Meyer and David DeWolf in the Utah Law Review (2000). To that extent, it should not have bowled them over that some schools might want to create test cases. Once that case came along, at first TDI cooperated reluctantly, by providing some leading ID people to testify. They were deposed several months prior to the trial, but in the intervening months at least three of them pulled out and did not come to the trial -- Meyer, Dembski, and Angus Campbell. Campbell was the most dangerous witness in the whole affair, from the perspective of the plaintiffs (the anti-ID people), b/c his ideas about democracy and science education are not easily countered. They were able effectively to refute testimony from Mike Behe a!

 nd Scott Minnich, but Campbell would have perhaps been another story.

Ted

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Received on Thu Aug 27 15:48:09 2009