Wow, this thread is moving fast.  I just noticed it.

The public-broadcasting program NOVA aired a 2 hour episode...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/

...this week on the Dover Colorado court case involving topics of:

separation of church and state,

definition of science and scientific theory,

whether intelligent design is a scientific theory,

whether the school board's action to require science teachers to read a 
4 paragraph statement saying basically that the theory of evolution is a 
mere theory and not 'fact' and making students aware of ID as an 
alternative had the primary intent and/or effect of introducing religion 
into the science classroom.

and a lot of actual arguments for and against both evolution and 
intelligent design: e.g. the concept of irreducible complexity (examples 
given were refuted by the scientists) and some tested examples of 
predictions made by evolution.



The claim by the defendants in the case (the school board) was that 
intelligent design is not religious and it is not creationism.  The 
plaintiffs got very lucking in finding one very interesting piece of 
evidence:  the 'missing link between creationism and intelligent 
design', namely the word "cintelligent designism" (or something like 
that). There was a 1980's paper which had been updated to replace all 
instances of "creationism" to "intelligent design" after a different 
court case, but had not been edited very carefully.  There was a strong 
connection between this paper and an intelligent-design textbook donated 
to the Dover school district, which made it more difficult for the 
plaintiffs to insist that there was no religious intent involved.

Anyway it was very interesting and worth seeing.

Charles

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