Thursday, December 22, 2005

ID - Scientific Theory?

While I was a bit suprised by the wording of his ruling, I would question that Judge Jones is an activist judge. He was appointed by President Bush, and he received praise from both sides of the aisle. I'd say that someone who is supported by Rick Santorum and Tom Ridge is probably not a radical leftie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/national/18judge.html

To the more important matter: Does intelligent design have a place in the science classroom? I have no problem with ID being taught under the heading of science as long as there is a sufficient amount of scientific study to back it up. As of right now, ID is not a valid scientific theory since it does not have a testable hypothesis. Without a testable hypothesis, you can't follow through on the steps of the scientific method. Ergo, no hypothesis, no theory, not science.

2 comments:

slowpitch said...

Yeah, I'm so glad federal courts are deciding what can and what cannot be taught in our classrooms.

At one time the Supreme Court ruled that a minimum wage/working condition law is unconstitutional because there was no economic justification for a legislature to interfere with a contract between workers. Today, we see that this was wrong (not striking down a minimum wage law, but overrulling an elected body where they clearly have authority).

We will uncertainly look upon these ridiculous rulings as completely wrong in the future; in fact, this dumb ruling would surely be overturned by a higher court today (it's just not clear that the ruling will be appealed because the school board that mandated ID has already been voted out).

Activist judges come in all shapes. Just because a judge was appointed by a Republican doesn't make them immune from making retarded decisions, although it does hedge aginst the chance *a lot*. Most of the Supreme Court was appointed by Republicans, yet a bare majority still incorrectly decided Kelo v. New London earlier this year.

radar said...

And my concern is only that a school district is evidently not allowed to develop it's own curriculum. That is left up to a judge? As Slowpitch emphasizes the situation was corrected by democratic method. The judge, however, still felt that he needed to develop curriculum.