Yes, its the same guy.  Discovery Institutes policy is that the ID theory should not be required teaching in school.

That judge you talk of, is that the guy that lifted over 90% of his summary directly word for word from the ACLU brief, the brief that was prepared before the Judge even heard any testimony?

They promote the theory consistent with their policy.  They do no promote it as religious dogma.  They offer it as a scientific premise. 

It illuminates his prejudice when he lifts the vast majority of the material word for word from a brief by the plaintiffs attorney filed even before testimony was heard and then he denies the request by the publisher of the book to join the lawsuit and does not even allow them to file a brief.

How does one discern religious dogma from a scientific premise in your view?

Exploring this further:

What is the criteria for clasifying a premise religious verses scientific?  What does it mean to say something has no science behind it?

The merit of a scientific theory is its ability to explain empirical evidence.  The Darwinian evolutionary theory claims that modification and natural selection accounts for the diversity we observe in biological life.  By assuming the age of this Earth at 4 Billion years, and estimating the total biological information content, we can estimate the average required growth of biological information. By focusing on the Cambrian period, we can also estimate a peak rate.  Based on experiments and observations over the past 50 years we can estimate the average and maximum rate of new biological information generated.

Based on the Evolutionary narrative, what should we predict regarding these numbers? 

Would this offer a serious challenge to evolutionary theory if the observation is found to be more than a couple orders of magnitudes slower than the estimated average?  If not, can you provide a explanation as to why this is not a challenge? 

Design processes, even in biology are known to generate large quantities of new information very quickly.  Design can generate the required information rates.

What does it mean to say that a premise has no science behind it?

Yes, it has.  The articles I provided to jpn, in the SETI thread support ID concepts.  The Specified Complexity filter was peer reviewed and published.  There is a growing list of published peer reviewed texts with ID concepts.  More than the formal published articles the concept is heavily debated and the discussion has been steadily increasing for the past 20 years now.   


I agree that if the ID premise were a simple as you stated, the tests would be of limited significance.  For one we know that complex configurations occur routinely.  The exact molecular configuration of by back yard is very complex and yet the configuration quite clearly occurred by a material mechanism.  No complexity is not enough to doubt the material processes described by evolution. 

A more correct statement of the ID premise, one that is falsifiable and testable is this:  ID is the premise that many items and events observed in nature are best explained by design.  It is testable by identifying such an item hypothesizing that it was designed and then testing it to see if design can explain it and if material mechanisms can explain it.  It is falsified if a material mechanism is identified that accounts for the item or event. 


There are a number of equally and stronger cases for design than the universal probability limit as applied to Specified Complexity.  Information Theory, The conservation of information, No Free Lunch theorem and application to search evolutionary algorithms and fitness functions, etc.  Then there is the empirical limits of evolutionary processes as compared to the seemingly unlimited capability of genetic engineering.  The fact that medicine advances most rapidly when one presumes design and proceeds to reverse engineer biological function is a serious indicator that biological systems indicate design is a better explanation. 

jpn, perhaps then I should conclude that the problem you are having is that your knowledge is too limited.

Wow, I didn't realize that for about thirty years after the Scope's trial, evolution was considered too controversial to teach in most science classes.

My god, imagine trying to understand biology, astronomy, geology, to say nothing of paleontology, without knowing about evolution.

Thus the religious crippled American science for decades.

Even today much of the theory is withheld from students because of the pressure from religious groups. It is often just glossed over rather than given the time such an important and central theory in science deserves.

Thus the religious continue to cripple American science.

I really admire the judge of the case, since he was a conservative who believed in ID before the trial, but was open-minded enough and professional enough to listen carefully to the evidence and rule that it was not science after all.

I must say, however, the evidence presented against ID was staggering. Most damning of all was probably the way the legal team showed how a key ID reference book, Of Pandas and People, was originally a Creationist textbook, and was altered after a Supreme Court case outlawing the teaching of Creationism. The revised book had excised all reference to creationism, and replaced it with references to ID.

It was published anyway. The work has never been reviewed in the appropriate journals. You would think something this earth-shattering would be subject to ongoing review in the mathmatical journals and vetted against known (i.e. human) design elements before there is an attempt to apply it to biological systems. Dembski has shown a curious reluctance to mix it up with his peers. Either he is a misunderstood genius wrongly maligned by a materialist conspiracy or his hypothesis doesn't quite cut it.


It's not being heavily debated anywhere that matters. Run a PubMed search on any aspect of evolutionary theory and contrast it to a search involving Specified Complexity or Irreducible Complexity as it applies to biology. Hear the crickets chirping?