Science Reporting

I’m pleased to announce a new member of the Evolution News and Views blogger team! Michael Francisco is a second year law student at Cornell Law School. Raised in the science town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, he has been interested in the intelligent design movement since the 1990s. Michael is happily married to his wife, Christina, who is also from Los Alamos. Before attending Cornell Law School, Michael earned a B.A. in History & Philosophy from Hillsdale College, where he was manager of the debate team, a freelance journalist, and the founder of an IDEA club chapter. Michael currently serves at president of the Cornell Federalist Society chapter. He’ll be a semi-regular contributor to ENV over the coming months.

A California high school has settled out of court with Americans United for Separation of Church and State who had complained and sued over the school’s teaching of an elective philosophy class called “Philosophy of Design.” The settlement orders the district to cancel the class by Friday next week and says: “No school over which the School District has authority, including the High School, shall offer, presently or in the future, the course entitled “Philosophy of Design or “Philosophy of Intelligent Design” or any other course that promotes or endorses creationism, creation science, or intelligent design.”

Clearly, Americans United for Separation of Students from Science is singing a different tune now than they did last year during the Dover trial.

In the January 16 edition of the Weekly Standard in an article titled “Survival of the Evolution Debate” Adam Wolfson recites the long debunked mantra of Darwinists accusing ID of merely residing on Paleyian analogical reasoning and therefore being subject to Hume’s critique. In Wolfson’s own words:

In making such claims the IDers are putting old wine in a new bottle. Some version of the design thesis is to be found in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and, perhaps most famously, in the writings of William Paley. The 18th-century English theologian argued that when we find a watch we infer a watchmaker; so too when we discover evidence of design in nature we properly infer a Maker or Creator.