Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
On Tuesday, PBS aired a much-anticipated episode of their NOVA science documentary program entitled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which covered the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover court battle.
If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll catch you up: back in 1987, the SCOTUS smacked down the teaching of creationism in public schools as the blatant First Amendment violation — and utter disgrace to real science — that it is. Never ones to give up easily, the creationists repackaged their nonsense by removing explicit references to “God” and changing the name of their position to “Intelligent Design“.
According to Wikipedia, ID holds that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The blatant mischaracterization of natural selection as being “undirected” aside, this assertion is the intellectual equivalent of “I can’t think of how this might have evolved… so… umm… God did it! (Err, I mean, an unspecified intelligent entity did it!)”.
Naturally, the scientific community, which has this closed-minded, dogmatic tendency to reach conclusions based on things like “facts” and “evidence” and “logic”, overwhelmingly rejects both creationism per se and its modern politically-correct incarnation.
Anyway, the NOVA documentary was very well-done. It was my impression that they presented both sides of the argument fairly, and did a good job of explaining, in an accessible manner, why ID is such a horrible idea — it is obviously not science, and it clearly is religion in disguise.
Here are some excerpts from the transcript:
KENNETH MILLER: Intelligent design is a science stopper.
KEVIN PADIAN: Intelligent design is not anywhere a scientific concept. It’s not a field of science. It’s not being actively researched by anyone.
KENNETH MILLER: It’s a violation of everything we mean and everything we understand by science.
NARRATOR: Citing what he called the “breathtaking inanity” of the school board’s decision, [the judge] found that several members had lied “to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design Policy.”
JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: The crushing weight of the evidence indicates that this was a, a considered pattern by this School Board that the board set out to get creationism into— science classrooms. And intelligent design was— simply— the vehicle that they utilized to do that.
JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: In an era where we’re trying to cure cancer— where we’re trying to—prevent pandemics, where we’re trying to keep science and math education on the cutting edge in the United States. To introduce and teach bad science to ninth grade students make very little sense to me. You know, garbage in, garbage out. And it doesn’t benefit any of us who benefit daily from scientific discoveries.
I’d highly recommend watching the episode, which is available on PBS’s website. (If, like me, you’d prefer to download the whole episode as one Xvid file, you can easily go through the usual channels to do so.)