Judge John E. Jones, a former trial attorney and State Liquor Control Board member who now is a federal judge for central Pennsylvania, is also a new phenomenon on the federal bench: a judge who, having made a ruling (e.g., the Dover case), goes on speaking tours and television shows to promote himself, his ruling and — yesterday — a PBS documentary on his ruling. Yesterday morning he was on the Today Show. Soon we will be asked to consider his views on the Iraq War or the writers’ strike in Hollywood. Maybe he should retire and start a talk show for Air America (where he also has appeared). There must have been others who have broken from the long-standing Read More ›
When John E. Jones decided in 2005 to “traipse into” the controversial area of evolution and science education, deciding the scientific merit of intelligent design as a federal court judge in Dover, PA, he may have only dreamed of the day when he would see himself on the silver screen. As the author of the 139-page verdict in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Jones gained national notoriety (and much acclaim from certain fashionable quarters) for ruling that intelligent design is not science but religion. That more than 90% of the section on intelligent design was copied nearly verbatim from the ACLU didn’t diminish his standing as a “great thinker” in the mainstream press. Neither did the fact that the Judge Read More ›
A “Briefing Packet for Educators” just issued by PBS in conjunction with the NOVA program Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial inserts religion into the classroom and encourages teaching practices that are likely unconstitutional, says Discovery Institute.
“The NOVA/PBS teaching guide encourages the injection of religion into classroom teaching about evolution in a way that likely would violate current Supreme Court precedents about the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause,” says Dr. John West, vice president for public policy and legal affairs with Discovery Institute.
Tuesday, November 13th, Discovery Institute will publish its own guide, The Theory of Intelligent Design: A briefing packet for educators, to help teachers understand the debate between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. The briefing packet can be downloaded here or copies can be requested by e-mailing cscinfo@discovery.org.
Proving once again that he’s not one to take things lying down, Michael Behe is posting a new series of responses over at his Amazon blog. This response is different from the others he’s been posting. As Behe explains In his introductory post from Friday, available here: This series of posts (besides this intro, there will be five posts over the next week) will be different. Here I will address a post on the blog The Panda’s Thumb by a man named Ian Musgrave. Musgrave, a professor at the University of Adelaide, wrote “An Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe”, in which he questioned my earlier reply to a woman named Abbie Smith, who is a graduate student working on Read More ›
In 2005 Judge John E. Jones, presiding over the Dover intelligent design trial, ruled that intelligent design is religion, not science, because he felt he was in the best position to “traipse into such a controversial area” and settle the debate over intelligent design once and for all.
Tomorrow, PBS will air NOVA’s propaganda piece reenacting some parts of the Dover trial, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.” PBS claims the program will tell the true story behind the Dover trial. But will it?
The program features the usual cast of characters: anti-ID activist Eugenie Scott, Darwinist Ken Miller, and apparently Judge Jones himself (currently on his second annual self-congratulatory globe-trotting tour — be sure to catch him on your local NPR station and Air America). The program will attempt to show that intelligent design is creationism and therefore more religion than science. Like the misleading “Evolution” miniseries PBS produced in 2001, this is an attempt to stifle scientific inquiry and censor science by making talking and researching about intelligent design out of bounds. Here are a few truths about intelligent design you won’t get from PBS/NOVA’s “Judgment Day” program.
Myth #1: There are no peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting intelligent design. Judge Jones said that ID “…has not generated peer-reviewed publications.”
FACT: Judge Jones is simply wrong. Discovery Institute submitted an amicus brief to Judge Jones that documented various peer-reviewed publications, which he accepted into evidence. This is a fact-based question which is hard to get wrong. The fact is that there are peer-reviewed papers supporting intelligent design.
Was justice denied to Foundation for Thought and Ethics during the Kitzmiller intelligent design trial? Whether or not it was, do you think NOVA will relate this information in their Judgment Day program about the trial next week? Don’t count on it. Last year attorneys Seth Cooper and Leonard Brown published an article entitled, “A Textbook Case of Judicial Activism: How a Pro-ID Publisher Was Denied its Day in Court,” which describes how the publisher of the textbook Of Pandas and People, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), was denied the right to become a party to the Kitzmiller trial, despite the fact that its intellectual property rights were implicated in the lawsuit.
Interestingly, FTE had completed manuscripts of a new intelligent design book, The Design of Life, and at that time it was already under review for publication.
First they dramatized the O.J. Simpson trial. Then they acted out Michael Jackson’s courtroom drama. This time around we have NOVA reenacting parts of the 2005 Dover intelligent design trial presided over by Judge John E. Jones.
As NOVA’s website points out, Paula Apsell, senior producer for NOVA’s propaganda piece on intelligent design, Judgment Day, felt “compelled” to make the docudrama. Journalists are usually only “compelled” to report on events by their editors, or by the newsiness (timeliness, proximity, impact, conflict, etc) of a specific issue/event.
So, why were Apsell and NOVA compelled to make this program?
For those of you who missed Dr. John West‘s lecture at The Heritage Foundation this week in Washington, D.C., it is now available online (look for November 6, 2007). West had a strained voice that day, yet he spoke eloquently on “The Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.” In this lecture, he covers what he sees as five impacts of scientific materialism on public policy. If you like what you see, don’t forget to check out Darwin Day in America.
Today, CSC Fellow Paul Nelson will be speaking at the University of Buffalo and tomorrow at Daemen College on “Does the Complexity of Life Prove Intelligent Design?” The first lecture takes place at the University of Buffalo’s North Campus, in Cooke Hall, Room 121, on Thursday, November 8th at 8:00 pm. For directions click here. The lecture on Friday, November 9th is at 6:30 pm at Daemen College in the Wick Center Social Room. For directions to this location, click here.
