DEFENSE TEAM SPIN: Back to the Labs!:

“A thou­sand opin­ions by a court that a par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry is invalid will not make that sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry invalid,” said Thomp­son, the pres­i­dent and chief coun­sel of the Thomas More Law Cen­ter, a pub­lic inter­est firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., that says it pro­motes Chris­t­ian values.

Nei­ther will a thou­sand lawyers make a non­sci­en­tif­ic idea into a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis. Judge Jones did­n’t talk about valid­i­ty, he talked about whether it’s science:

After a search­ing review of the record and applic­a­ble caselaw, we find that while ID argu­ments may be true, a propo­si­tion on which the Court takes no posi­tion, ID is not sci­ence. We find that ID fails on three dif­fer­ent lev­els, any one of which is suf­fi­cient to pre­clude a deter­mi­na­tion that ID is sci­ence. They are: (1) ID vio­lates the cen­turies-old ground rules of sci­ence by invok­ing and per­mit­ting super­nat­ur­al cau­sa­tion; (2) the argu­ment of irre­ducible com­plex­i­ty, cen­tral to ID, employs the same flawed and illog­i­cal con­trived dual­ism that doomed cre­ation sci­ence in the 1980’s; and (3) ID’s neg­a­tive attacks on evo­lu­tion have been refut­ed by the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. As we will dis­cuss in more detail below, it is addi­tion­al­ly impor­tant to note that ID has failed to gain accep­tance in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, it has not gen­er­at­ed peer-reviewed pub­li­ca­tions, nor has it been the sub­ject of test­ing and research.

By “flawed and illog­i­cal con­trived dual­ism” he means that IDol­a­tors try to say “evo­lu­tion could­n’t do that, so a design­er must have.” While they haven’t suc­cess­ful­ly done the first (shown that evo­lu­tion could­n’t have done X), it is in prin­ci­ple pos­si­ble. Claim­ing that you’ve dis­proven X, there­fore Y is bad log­ic. All you’ve shown is that not X is true, leav­ing an infi­nite range of alter­na­tives to evaluate.

On a relat­ed note, espe­cial­ly to this ear­li­er post, Bill Wagnon, who rep­re­sents Lawrence and Tope­ka in the Board of Ed., writes that:

I think that Judge Jones was attempt­ing to be uni­ver­sal, and his remarks were par­tic­u­lar­ly appro­pri­ate for the Kansas Sci­ence Stan­dards adopt­ed by the rad­i­cal major­i­ty on the board. Cor­rec­tive action in Kansas will prob­a­bly be found in the out­come of the elec­tion in 2006, rather than anoth­er court case.

Here’s hop­ing.