Category: Free Speech
Response to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account Part I: Eating Forrest’s “Legal Mincemeat”
[Editor’s Note: A single article combining all ten installments of this response to Barbara Forrest can be found here, at “Response to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account.” The individual installments may be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10.] Barbara Forrest is a philosopher and was an expert witness against intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. Since she has recently posted her take on the Kitzmiller trial here, I have had the pleasure of responding by constructing a ten-part response. The pleasure is mine because of the interesting comments from Forrest, including affirmatively calling ID-proponents labels such as “creationists,” “legal mincemeat,” “jaw-droppingly stupid,” “evangelical Read More ›
Learn about “True Religion” According to Judge Jones: Watch the Traipsing Into Evolution C-SPAN Event Online
If you want to watch John West and I speaking about the Kitzmiller decision on C-SPAN-2’s Book-TV, it is now online in Real Player format, here. Unfortunately, the video is pretty low-resolution, but the audio comes through very well. John West makes an interesting point that since the Kitzmiller decision, Judge Jones has engaged in a number of speaking engagements, including one where he stated that as a judge, he is guided by the belief that “true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible.” Here’s the whole statement as recorded in the transcript of the commencement address: The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained Read More ›
Was Justice Denied to Foundation for Thought and Ethics during the Kitzmiller Intelligent Design Trial?
Seth Cooper and Leonard Brown have published an article entitled, “A Textbook Case of Judicial Activism: How a Pro-ID Publisher Was Denied its Day in Court,” which describes how the publisher of the textbook Of Pandas and People, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), was denied the right to become a party to the Kitzmiller trial despite the fact that its intellectual property rights were implicated in the lawsuit. As background, the right of a party to “intervene” in a lawsuit is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24 (a): (a) Intervention of Right. Upon timely application anyone shall be permitted to intervene in an action: (1) when a statute of the United States confers an unconditional right to Read More ›
C-SPAN’s Book TV to air Traipsing Into Evolution Saturday, Aug. 26th
Saturday, August 26th at 7pm EST C-SPAN’s BookTV will air “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision”, featuring two of the book’s authors, John West and Casey Luskin. The program will air again Sunday, August 27th at 6:30am EST and Monday, August 28 at 12:00am EST. The featured event was held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington D.C. for Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, the first book-length critique of Judge John E. Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case, the first court case to assess the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The event, held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington, D.C., was full, (as was a similar one in Seattle at Read More ›
Derbyshire Attacks Gilder Part III: Praising Judge Jones while Pretending To Not Praise George Gilder
Maybe the most fascinating part of Derbyshire’s article is the candor with which he evaluates the strength of Gilder’s arguments. Derbyshire states clearly that “[Gilder’s metaphysic] refutes evolution, which has high-information-bearing substrates arising out of low-information-bearing ones… [and] As metaphysics go, [Gilder’s is] a pretty good schema… a good metaphysic for our age…” Thus it seems that Derbyshire affirms one of Gilder’s central points! In an attempt to not sell the entire farm, Derbyshire assures his fellow naturalists that we are “getting along just fine… discovering new things about the world, pushing the wheel of knowledge forward a few inches every year.” But Darwinist biologist Franklin M. Harold wrote that while “[w]e should reject, as a matter of principle, the Read More ›