Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (USDC, MD Pa. 2005), may very well sound the death knell of the still adolescent concept known as “intelligent design.†The federal court in Harrisburg issued Judge Jones’ 139 page opinion on December 20 and the opinion is available not only from the court’s website but all over the web. There are a number of typographical errors and there are a number of grammatical problems with the opinion, both of which indicate to me the work of an inexperienced judge, three years on the bench, and a similarly new court staff, rushing too quickly to get the opinion out the door, possibly before it leaked or their own work load caught up with them. They have an opportunity to clean it up for publication, in which they might indulge. Nevertheless, if the opinion is a correct summation of the six week trial record, the decision should not have been unexpected.
I am avoiding the temptation to post a summary of the decision. The troubling part of the decision for intelligent design advocates simply are the findings that there is no scientific basis for intelligent design as a theory of science, notwithstanding that it might have a theological basis. Indeed, the court went so far as to classify current intelligent design pronouncements as sham science promoted by religious activists. The court did this after an exhaustive inquiry during a six week trial on the merits, forever memorialized in 139 pages of reflective summation. The court seemed to do a workmanlike job describing the facts in the record, and if that is so, then intelligent design, as a concept is still adolescent, still dependent upon its intellectual parentage for nurture and survival, and unable to be self determining or of any value. It might be an interesting notion, it might even be true, but it is not a contender in the scientific world, so the court held, and the court is, unfortunately, right.
I respectfully submit that any review or comment about the court decision that is published or posted without a reading of the opinion will largely be uninformed. It took me an entire evening to read it, so I am certain just the time commitment will stop some from reading it, even if many are not stopped from commenting.
For me, the saddest part of the decision was not the lucid dismemberment of intelligent design and failure of intelligent design to survive judicial review even as a bone fide scientific concept, but the record of intemperate conduct by its advocates detailed in the decision. I have served as a school board member of a public school district, and I was embarrassed by the record left behind by school board members in this decision. I am not talking about the failed advocacy, but about the apparent immoral conduct that had to be the result of an “ends justifies the means†and scorched earth thinking. If the lawyers involved must share the blame for the appearance of untruthfulness to a federal court, then so be it.
