Cornell Students Protest President Rawlings’ Speech Condemning ID

The IDEA Club at Cornell sent me this today about the anti-ID statements made by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings during his recent state-of-the-campus-address. I first learned about this press release after reading about it in this article in the Cornell Daily Sun. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Hannah Maxson Email: idea@cornell.edu Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, October 22 – The Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club at Cornell is deeply concerned with President Hunter Rawlings’ blatant disregard for the facts concerning Intelligent Design in Friday’s State of the University Address. In a speech usually reserved for current university business, he spent over two thirds of his time blasting the emerging Intelligent Design theory as anti-scientific and religious in an unscrupulous, unknowledgeable manner. Read More ›

Neumayr on Dover Science Reporters Who Don’t Like Science and a Civil Liberty Union that Doesn’t Much Like Civil Liberty

George Neumayr of the American Spectator has a good column about the Dover trial: The ACLU has gone from defending teachers to prosecuting them. In a federal courtroom this week, the ACLU argued that science teachers in the school district of Dover, Pennyslvania, are not free under the Constitution to question evolutionary theory. He discusses various journalists’ reactions to it:

Intelligent Design in Australia

Stephen E. Jones has his finger on the pulse of the debate over design in Australia. See: Ban design theory in class: [Australian] scientists, etc

Top News: Smoking Causes Cancer; Unrest in the Middle East; 7000 Scientists Support Darwin

A press release has reported that over 7000 people (over half of which are scientists with Ph.D.s) have signed an online petition rejecting ID. Elsewhere, equally newsworthy reports tell us that there is unrest in the Middle East, and smoking causes cancer. Oh yeah, and according to Al Jazeera, Europe apparently still doesn’t support George Bush. Incredible? Think again. Seriously, no one denies that Darwin’s theory is the majority view. What’s the big deal about this press release? The issue is whether the Darwinists are right to make appeals to authority to argue that evolution should be taught one-sidedly in schools. It is for this reason that Discovery has made it clear that a growing number of legitimate, highly-credentialed scientists Read More ›

Intro to Legal Brief in Dover Trial Defending Teaching of Intelligent Design

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT In this case, plaintiffs have made two main types of claims. First, they have made fact-based claims that the specific policy adopted by the Dover Area School Board (“DASB”) violates the first and second prongs of the Lemon test. Second, they claim that the theory of intelligent design is an “inherently religious concept” such that teaching students about it would necessarily violate Lemon’s first and second prongs under any circumstances. Amicus vigorously disputes this second, more general claim, but takes no position on the first.