PBS Indoctrination - Some thoughts

So the PBS Nova presentation on the Dover Intelligent Design case was about what I expected.

The defendants looked like dishonest idiots. The ACLU Lawyers looked like knights in shining armor. Michael Behe was conspicuously absent, PBS claimed he "refused" to be interviewed, which was false. They highlighted the "establishment clause", well, half of it. "No law respecting the establishment of religion." They left out the part about prohibiting the free exercise of it. The usual stuff.

But all that is what we've come to expect. I did note Behe had a response at the Discovery Institute site which pertains directly to the decision of Judge John Jones.

"The Court’s reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; the incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself;"



It is curious, this "conflation" of ID with Creationism, the "implications" vs the "theory". What Behe is saying is that because ID might imply the existence of God, and have implications for religion, in the eyes of the court ID must be religion. Of course the opposite is never considered by Judge Jones or PBS, that because Darwinism has negative implications for religion, Darwinism must be atheism. So a double standard is maintained, that Darwinism is neutral toward religion (lots of folks in the PBS song and dance were religious people who accepted Darwinism) while ID is not (failing to mention anyone who accepts ID who is not a fundamentalist or even a theist).

Creationism is specifically an attempt, and I think a valid one, to find a way to reconcile the claims of a religious text with scientific explanations of origins. And there are many approaches to this, some more friendly than others to Darwin. ID on the other hand, studiously avoids religious texts and appeals only to observable data and reason, which does not mean its proponents are agnostic. It simply means they attempt to be objective scientists. But because ID has implications for theism, it is ruled out of bounds - while the implications for atheism inherent in Darwinism are ignored. This is crystal clear in the ruling itself. Judge John Jones wrote in his opinion the key assumption of the entire debate:

(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;

Note the key phrase "permitting supernatural causation". So science must not permit any notion of the supernatural in the question of orgins. Nevermind that ID does not insist intelligent causes must be supernatural, if science cannot even permit any notion of anything outside of nature, how is the conclusion not guaranteed in the definition? Much was made in the PBS presentation about true scientific theories must be falsifiable. How is Darwinism falsifiable if the very definition of science insists that all must be explained purely in terms of natural processes with purely natural causes? How could anything other than a-theism ever be considered scientific?

When the conclusion is guaranteed by the assumptions, then no amount of reasoning or evidence can ever change the outcome. The Dover case, like all cases relating to origins, turn on the monolithic assumption of naturalism, and never truly depend on the facts, logic, research of the people involved. Darwinism is the creation myth that has become dogma in the modern era. All who challenge it will be branded as heretics. And the high priests of public opinion at PBS have done their best to demonize anyone who questions the prophet Charles Darwin as total kooks.