The Significance of the Dover Decision

No, randman was discussing a hypothetical, he started with 'if the judge ruled in favor of teaching Intelligent Design' (my emphasis), the point he was making was that the judges decision, whichever way it went, has no impact on the truthfulness of ID. He's right too - however what does have an impact on the truthfulness of ID was how awful their best defence was when under cross-examination. It doesn't directly effect the truthfulness of ID, but it does lay out clearly the vacuum that is their present argument after thousands of years of the idea existing.It shows how ID is great at rhetoric, but when the venue doesn't favour rhetoric (such as under cross-examination where your position is nailed down) ID has nothing. The Discovery Institute came right out and said that ID is not ready yet - which was a rather telling statement.

Dover School parents took the issue to court because they felt it was unconstitutional to require teachers to say what they were being told to say in a science classroom. It turns out that the judge agreed on the constitutionality of it.ID is a formidable entity. It has millions of dollars and a wonderful PR company, it doesn't play by the rules of science, and seeks to infiltrate school board rooms. This is unconstitutional, and 11 parents decided to sue the school board for their actions. The parents won their suit, and in the process ID was shown for what it was with the best arguments out.And you are very right that the 11 parents felt threatened. A religious group had infiltrated their education system and had forced the staff to teach children in a fashion that was unconstitutional. I think it is entirely appropriate to consider this a threat to the education of their children.Evolution didn't need defending in court. All that needed to be shown was that the material presented in the recommended book was fallacious, had a religious interest and was not, actually, science.What is telling is that cdesign proponantists were so incapable of defending their ideas: Several figures tried to file an amicus curiae to get their point of view heard without the awkward cross-examination. All they had were demonstrable falsehoods, misrepresentations and some outright lies. It wasn't a PR success. Still, "teach the controversy!" was an interesting direction that is currently brewing in schools around Florida and Texas.

Me too, I enjoy reading court transcripts for some weird reason so I was all over them.

Yes, school boards should be able to judge this for themselves. But what would you do if you thought that your kids were attending a school which was giving them a poor education by virtue of breaking the constitution? Let us say, your children were being taught, in biology, that the Koran is a book which is considered by many to be an a perfect book for understanding the world and stands alongside the germ theory of disease as an appropriate code for handling illness?You might not do so, but I'm sure you'd understand that some Christians might sue the school board for allowing this unconstitutional behaviour.If ID requires gaining support by appealing directly to credulous children rather than gaining support in the adult scientific community, then it has a bleak future indeed.

But you understand that some parents might legitimately challenge the promotion of the Islamic religion by a public body if the Koran was referenced as a legitimate alternative body of knowledge concerning disease? As I said, ID started pushing "Teach the controversy" when it became clear that they couldn't get "Teach ID!" through. The criticisms of various hypothesis require first understanding the hypothesis. Before you can understand the hypothesis you need to first understand evolution. Since most schools spend only a small amount of time on evolution, it would be impractical to teach people from almost zero knowledge to knowing what evolution is, to some of the various controversial hypotheses and their proponents and criticisms. That is the kind of thing that takes a lot of background knowledge to really appreciate and is more suited to a dedicated course, such as at university.You might not think what is taught is honest, but the vast majority of experts in the relevant fields disagree with you. Who should school boards listen to when deciding a curriculum? I vote for the relevant experts in the relevant fields.

Unfortunately education can't be what we would like it to be, especially if we open it for all. There are problems with the way we teach all subjects, teaching kids to pass exams and failing to teach them explore, learn and question. This is not specific to evolution teaching, but all education.It is a sad state of affairs, but overhauling the education system costs a lot of money. Dawkins gave a great talk about this problem called indoctrination versus education.There are lots of kids, and a lot of facts. The choice to date is to try and teach them a broad selection of facts so that they might specialize later in their educational career if they choose or go into the world with a basic understanding of a variety of subjects.Heck, the fact that education is so universally academic annoys me. I'd like to see more practical lessons in subjects like personal finances and the like.With all that borne in mind, it seems crazy to try and let special interest groups dictate what gets taught, let scientists decide what would be a good founding in science based on what they know about science and the time permitted for its teaching.

Ordinarily you are right. This was a straightforward case where eleven parents sued their school board for engaging in unconstitutional behaviour. However, the Dover case does mean something more. Ed Brayton does an excellent talk on the subject here (It starts of discussing the wedge document but about 4 minutes in the origins of the Dover case begins).He talks about how certain ID activists were trying to find a school district that would take on Of Pandas and People as a science textbook. How the Thomas More Law centre offered to represent the school board for free should it get to court and Dover accepted this offer. This is the first point of interest, some IDers wanted to get a court case. Some evolutionists wanted a court case too - they wanted to bury this thing as soon as possible. Also of note is that the Dover board's attorney advised them against adopting the policy they adopted, and as a result they weren't covered under their liability insurance. All the legal costs for losing the case wouldn't be covered by the insurance.So, this was significant in that it was to be the test case for ID. If ID won this case, we could expect them to start trying it at other school districts.Brayton covers the documented lies made by the ID proponents in the case and continues that discussion throughout part 3. Part 4 goes into detail about whose who in the trial, the expert witnesses, the lawyers the plaintiffs etc as well as those expert witnesses that backed out of it as well as the discovery period. Little about the significance in this part, but it does explain some of the reasons this is such a compelling and dramatic case and why people seriously considered making a movie about it. Part 5 begins with the discussion of the earlier copies (pre and early 1987) of the ID textbook, of Pandas and People and a reference to the immortal cross examination of Behe. It's entertaining, and it shows the magnitude of the face loss that the ID movement was suffering...before the judgement had even begun! The end of five and the beginning of 6 describes the unusual defence witness, Steve Fuller. He argued, along similar lines that you have argued, that fringe ideas should be taught alongside established ideas. His reasons may be different than yours, but that idea was part of the trial, so you might want to check that out.Part 6 of the talk also discusses the significance of the outcome in a little detail so might also be worth checking with regard to this thread. It even mentions the argument 'judges don't decide science' which has come up in this thread.The central significance to all of this? ID suffered a major blow and lost a lot of face and clout. Nobody wanted to touch ID because they'd get sued, and a school board that ignores its legal council can render its liability insurance void. Legal council would be more likely now to reject any advances of ID and since people didn't want to lose money in the light of the loss of liability insurance ID's battleground for getting into the schools was stopped.So ID had to change tactics. And this is what we see you arguing here and we are seeing it more frequently now. Teach the controversy. Don't teach ID, teach the problems with evolution. This has been in the background for a while, but now we are starting to see this concept bandied around school boards. The content is essentially the same as ID, the same arguments are made only this time they don't mention any designer at all now. They just say that irreducibly complex things can't evolve and things like this.This is significant and we can trace these rumblings in Texas and Florida to the issues raised in the Dover case. You can't just read some highlights of the judgement and expect to see this significance. It was the test trial for ID and this made it significant as part of the political battle ID was waging. What happened in that case would influence the policy of school boards regarding anti-evolution rhetoric throughout the country. Nobody wants to get sued, after all.It was insignificant from a science point of view - ID had already lost there so the court case didn't really significantly impact that argument. It was the political aims of the influential supporters of ID that were hampered by this decision, and that is a significant landmark in the 'culture wars' as Brayton likes to call it.

What law? The Dover case was a civil suit where a school board got sued. There was no law established, just a variety of existing laws looked at. Which of these existing laws do you think will be overturned, or did you mean that the current interpretation of the law will change? Correct. So if we find a group of people claiming to hold a scientific idea but the scientific community rejects them so instead they try to create situations wherein a court case will happen because they believe a successful court case will allow them to get their topic taught in school then we might conclude (assuming a free country) that this so-called scientific idea is on very weak ground.I'm glad we agree. I wish it were, I'd have absolutely no problem with it then. It would be merely a philosophical empirical argument. One of the many such arguments that claims to be a good direction for science to look into next.Unfortunately 'ID' is a political and legal movement with a lot of money, lawyers and a PR firm. I think we should separate the teleology from the bullshit political movement. We already have a word for teleology. If you want to be a scientific teleologist, call yourself an STist or somethnig. ID is a different monster. Yes, this a sad possibility. This is why the ID movement has skipped the appealing to scientists part entirely. It is much easier to try and make this kind of scenario happen than it is to convince trained sceptics that ID is legitimate science. That is why spends money on films spreading lies to make them look oppressed by great Goliath of dogmatic science, on PR companies and lawyers. That is why we call ID a political movement and not a scientific one.ID spends an enormous amount of resources on building this appearance of unfairness and discrimination. Why bother spending their millions of dollars on research when they can spend it on propaganda? A much more cost-effective way to realize the goals of the wedge strategy. In the US the figure is closer to 80% I think that currently any scientific textbook or paper that denies the existence of God is already unacceptable and untenable. Of course, if a public body were to promote a theistic religious view in a scientific context, that too would be unacceptable and untenable. It would be promoting theistic religions over non-theistic ones: I'm fairly sure that isn't kosher either.

I have no idea what time scales you are talking about here but the majority opinion from McCreary County vs ACLU of Kentucky:

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Despite the intuitive importance of official purpose to the realization of Establishment Clause values, the Counties ask us to abandon Lemon’s purpose test, or at least to truncate any enquiry into purpose here. Their first argument is that the very consideration of purpose is deceptive: according to them, true purpose is unknowable, and its search merely an excuse for courts to act selectively and unpredictably in picking out evidence of subjective intent. The assertions are as seismic as they are unconvincing.

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The last I heard it was only 3 judges that were of the opinion the Lemon test should go, Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas. Since then, who else has jumped on board? As you can imagine, our news media doesn't cover details about US constitutional opinion of a US branch of government too much.As a side note, (I'm not looking to debate it, which is why I'm not replying to the post in question), whether or not Axe actually does support ID is under dispute. An interesting discussion can be found here - which is doubly interesting because of the acknowledgement: "Also, many thanks are due to Douglas Axe, who graciously helped me with early drafts of this essay. ". The only reason I mention this at all is because Axe was one of the few papers related to Dover: Dembski included it in his Expert Report, along with nine other papers.Out of curiosity, has the dearth of papers that even remotely related to ID as shown by Dover resulted in an increase in ID's production of explicitly ID work? I've not seen any such increase in research, but that would make Dover quite significant - "a much needed kick in the pants", I believe you say stateside.