Category Archives: Education

The federal district court judge in Pennsylvania hearing the case brought by parents against the Dover Area School District Board of Education handed down his decision today and I am very happy to relate that he went with the parents. The decision was probably moot–since district voters booted eight of the nine board members favoring the absurd notion of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools in last month’s election–but will stand as precedent when other school boards try to do the same thing.

I chose to write when others try this because there’s no doubt in my mind fools such as the executives and financial backers of the Thomas More Law Center and organizations like it will not be stopped so easily. The Thomas More Law Center instigated the action by the Dover board and provided free legal aid to defend the lawsuit. Uggh!

As the judge said in his decision: Darwin’s theory “in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.” Of course it doesn’t! There’s absolutely nothing in the theory of evolution which asserts any answer to where life, the universe and everything came from and there’s no logical reason why a Creator couldn’t have included evolution in our existence. To me, in fact, evolution is almost implied by the concept of Free Will and Free Will is a core aspect of Christianity and other Western religions.

Last weekend the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran reporter Matt Franck’s article covering recent political action on the increasingly stupid anti-evolution campaign in Missouri, Intelligent design debate is still evolving in bistate. What really got to me about the article wasn’t the incessant hypocrisy of the people pushing ID, which I take as a given these days, but how poorly and irresponsibly the article was written. So I sent Matt a brief, polite note and since he’s chosen not to reply I thought I’d present it here for the record:

I just had the opportunity to read your article online and am hoping you could answer a question about it. In the article you include a comment from Granger: “But he said intelligent design was not a testable theory in the scientific sense and so had no place in the science class.”

My question is: Why is there no response from any of the ID supporters you spoke with rebutting this assertion? After all, this seems to be the most serious counter-argument to the entire intelligent design proposition.

The paper did run several responses in the Letters column, though all were concerned with the subject matter and not the quality of reporting. Unfortunately, regardless of perspective, all of them were more or less recapitulations of one or more of the talking points of the side to which the writer adheres.