Dover and Out?

I have not commented on the Dover decision because I have not yet had a chance to read it in its entirety. However, I think that Paul Nelson at ID the Future has written a very interesting piece which seems to be in agreement with my some of my preliminary feelings of what happened in the Dover case entitled La Vie Continue, and Somewhere Cicero is smiling -- Reflections on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision. I think that Mr. Nelson makes a very interesting point in the essay about the nature of the controversy.

One can readily find similar reactions in the wake of the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision from the Supreme Court. As I commented previously, Stephen Gould said "What else can they do?...It's all over."

But of course it wasn't all over -- see the headlines in your local paper and on the web today, 18 years after Edwards v. Aguillard and 23 after McLean v. Arkansas -- because the debate at hand is not, at bottom, a legal matter. Sure, the federal courts (at all levels) in the United States frequently become entangled with "creationism" and now "intelligent design," but these legal proceedings turn out to be oddly repetitive moving picture shows in a flapping canvas tent. Although the title on the marquee changes, the plot is strangely the same. You have seen this movie before. You know how it ends: the "creationists" lose in the courtroom. And yet the debate about origins continues.

Yup, my intitial reaction is that the decision by the court doesn't solve anything and won't solve anything because the entire Establishment Clause jurisprudence is hopelessly confused. But that is a story for another day.

Can you imagine that the pro-darwinists would have given up if the court ruled against them? If not, then certainly you can see where people who don't see ID in the same light as this judge did would not give up on advocating for ID simply because some small time judge erroneously decided that "ID" equals "creationism" equals "religion." A single judge cannot decide this issue, and it is only because the courts have so fouled up the standards for "Establishment Clause" cases that this matter is even being decided by a judge at all.