Defending Science by Defining It

The Washington Post has an astute analysis of [G.W. Bush-appointed] U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III's landmark 139-page opinion eviscerating the so-called "intelligent design" theory (which is a mere hypothesis at best, btw) entitled Defending Science by Defining It. It's a fascinating and enlightened read.

The ruling gives two arguments for why intelligent design is not science but is, in the judge's words, "an old religious argument for the existence of God." The first is that intelligent design invokes "a supernatural designer," while science, by definition, deals only with natural phenomena. Second, the court found that intelligent design suffers from blatant flaws in logic, one of the chief tools of science.

Since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, "science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena," Jones writes, noting that the scientific revolution was explicitly about the rejection of "revelation" in favor of empirical evidence. Since then, he writes, "science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea's worth."

Also: Jones writes, people would be well advised to remember that an argument against one thing cannot necessarily be interpreted as an argument for something else. For example, the fact that the fossil record is incomplete is not evidence that human beings must have been created in their current form." (Or that evolution is evidence either for or against the existence of God, for that matter.)

Meanwhile, TIME covers the ruling in an excellent piece entitled 'Breathtaking Inanity': How Intelligent Design Flunked Its Test Case, and also offers a practical look at the theory of evolution in Darwin Victorious.