It's All Greek To Me

On December 20th, 2005, Judge John E. Jones ruled that the Dover, PA school board acted in violation of the 1st amendment's establishment clause when it required that a statement be read to 9th grade biology students that deprecated Neo-Darwinism and put forth an alternative known as "Intelligent Design".

The 139 page ruling is logical and complete in every detail. While it may not be a binding precedent on other courts, I believe future rulings will have to give a nod of respect to Jones's well-formed arguments. Much of the testimony put forth by the plaintiff's expert witnesses was left completely unchallenged by the defence. The judge described what remained of the defence's case as "breathtaking inanity". The absolute bottom line of this trial is that the defence could only muster only a single scientist to testify on behalf of the school board, biochemist Micheal Behe (a man with no credentials in evolutionary biology) and he failed completely to phrase Intelligent Design in the language of science.

While many, including even Judge Jones, agree that Intelligent Design is an idea worthy of further examination, it's clear from the testimony that it is not an idea that exists in the language of science, where the verbs and nouns are the time-tested principles of peer review, predictability, reproducibility, objective measurements, etc; words markedly rare in Dr. Behe's testimony. Intelligent Design does not belong in a science class any more than Greek belongs in a French class. The idea that our 9th grade children should walk into a science class and be taught philosophy or theology or Greek is, to steal a phrase, breathtakingly inane.