Science and Culture Today | Page 1450 | Discovering Design in Nature

UPDATED 9.29.05/5:38pm (by Rob Crowther): Interestingly, we recently stumbled across this surprisingly prescient interview with Dr. Forrest, and in light of her recent notoriety due to her “expert” testimony for the Dover trial we thought that readers would like to read the transcript.

Two weeks before the Dover trial began, the Judge in the case skewered the “expert” witness report submitted to the Court by Louisiana professor Barbara Forrest, a long-time board member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association. Forrest’s report is mostly a rehash of the innuendos and conspiracy-mongering found in her book with Paul Gross, “Creationism’s Trojan Horse.” While Forrest’s potpourri of smears and overheated rhetoric is typically accepted uncritically by reporters, Judge John Jones has put the ACLU on notice that significant portions of Prof. Forrest’s expert report may be declared

Methodological Materialism and What If

The third morning of Kitzmiller vs. Dover found philosopher of science Robert Pennock testifying for the plaintiffs that science is a search for natural explanations of natural phenomena — a limitation known as methodological naturalism (or methodological materialism).

Pennock presented this as the definition of science, and said proponents of intelligent design are “trying to overturn” it, but later he conceded that there was a controversy among philosophers of science concerning whether methodological naturalism was essential to the definition of science.

Earlier in the trial, the ACLU led its first expert witness, biologist Kenneth Miller, through some counterfactual (or “what-if”) reasoning, an investigative tool often used by philosophers. I wish one of the attorneys had led Pennock through the following ”what if” scenario (in this case, a counterfactual that might be actual): What if something in the natural world was the product of design — say, the origin of the first life, or the fine tuning of the physical constants for life?

Now, a materialist might respond, “Well it wasn’t,” as if the mental exercise is some sort of sneaky, schoolyard trick: “Will you pretend for a minute that I’m cooler than you?” “All right, why?” “Ha! You admit it. I’m cooler than you.”

You can now read the transcript of the opening arguments in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case on Discovery Institute’s website here (the transcript is posted as an Adobe pdf document). The opening statements provide a good snapshot as to what each side is intending to show in the case. In its opening statement, the ACLU makes clear that it is essentially trying to prove two things:

The major media coverage of the lawsuit against the Dover School District is predictably thin on content. So as a public service, Evolution News and Views is going to try to post selected transcripts from the trial so that you can read for yourself what’s going on at the trial, unfiltered by the reporters and pundits. (Of course, we’re going to continue to offer our own analysis of what’s happening at the trial!) Because of the prohibitive expense in purchasing transcripts, we unfortunately won’t be able to provide a complete daily transcript of the trial. But we are going to try to post transcripts for some of the highlights.

Today at the Dover Trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness, philosopher of science Dr. Robert Pennock, focused on 4 topics: (1) methodological naturalism, (2) methodological naturalism, (3) his Avida paper, and (4) methodological naturalism. Additionally, he also talked about methodological naturalism and his Avida paper. Today I will address only two of these many topics: Dr. Pennock’s Avida paper and in another post, methodological naturalism (MN). First I will address the Avida Paper The “Avida paper” was published as “The Evolution of Biological Complexity,” in Nature, 423:139-144, by E. Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert T. Pennock, and Christoph Adami (May 8, 2003). Pennock and his other co-authors claim the paper “demonstrate[s] the validity of the hypothesis, first articulated by Darwin and supported today Read More ›

Harrisburg, PA — At the end of yesterday’s testimony in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the plaintiffs’ team highlighted for reporters a key plank of their argument against the Dover Policy calling student’s attention to a book in the school library about intelligent design. Plaintiffs reiterated evolutionist Dr. Kenneth Miller’s testimony that whereas design theorist Dr. Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument is testable and, therefore, scientific, “Irreducible complexity is just a negative argument against Darwinism, not a positive argument for design.” Thus, while irreducible complexity is a scientific hypothesis, the design inference supposedly is not. Miller insisted this holds for all intelligent design hypotheses. None of them, Miller argued, contains positive evidence for design. But in fact, design theorists do provide a Read More ›

Scrappleface.com is bravely bucking the trend to stay mum on the shocking opening to the Dover intelligent design trial.

Harrisburg, PA — The plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial are arguing that intelligent design sprang up in the wake of the 1987 Supreme Court decision against creation science, and the National Center for Science Education’s Nick Matzke is repeating the talking point to reporters: “Intelligent design is just a new label for creationism,” Mr. Matzke noted. “It is just the latest legal strategy for creationism. It evolved in 1987 right after the Supreme Court ruled against creationism and said that that was unconstitutional.” The assertion is demonstrably false. The idea of intelligent design reaches back to Socrates and Plato, and the term “intelligent design” as an alternative to blind evolution was used as early as 1897. More recently, Read More ›

Harrisburg, PA – In the second morning of testimony in the ACLU’s lawsuit against a Dover, Pennsylvania school district, Darwinist Kenneth Miller conceded that in one sense he was a creationist, since he attributed the laws of physics and chemistry to an “author of all things, seen and unseen.” He read back a portion of the testimony he gave when he served as a fact witness in the Cobb County, Georgia textbook sticker case, in which he defined creationism in its narrow, contemporary sense as a view arguing for a young earth (6-10,000 years) , six 24-hour days of creation by a supernatural being, and a geological record largely explained by a global flood. In this morning’s testimony, Miller conceded Read More ›

Good Morning America today aired a story by reporter Dan Harris about Discovery Institute and its role in the national debate over evolution. More than a month ago ABC News approached Discovery Institute with a request to sit down and interview CSC Director Stephen Meyer. We were hesitant based on previous run-ins with other ABC News crews, namely Nightline. They’ve done rather poor jobs on reporting about evolution and intelligent design in the recent past. So, we spoke at length with the producers about what sort of story they were doing and what their focus was and what Meyer’s role would be.