carlsonjok
Posts: 3326
Joined: May 2006
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My Evening with the Discovery Institute
Notes:Summary of the lecture in black. My comments/editorials in red. Casey is not the gifted presenter West was. Casey talked very fast and his presentation slides tended to be pretty dense with text. This makes it hard to capture alot of the context. On the plus side, having gone to law school, Casey is a bit obsessive about citations. So, I have tried to at least capture the citiations. I am considering putting all these posts out on a blog and then developing a more detailed write-up. Here I will just try to capture his point and save the citiations in case I do decide to do a more detailed write up.
Casey Luskin, MS JD Esq. on Kitzmiller v Dover and Academic Freedom
> Don Ewert provided an introductory comment where he stated he was the fifth person to sign the Dissent from Darwin list. When he moved to Oklahoma, two of his future colleagues found out that he signed the list and tried to have him fired. Don provided an introductory biography of Casey, which included a rapid fire list of articles he had published. There was some scientific publications from his time at Scripps, but I didn't catch the journal names. I did catch Touchstone Magazine and PCID (Progress in Complexity, Information and Design). PCID is published by the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design in Princeton, NJ which had William Dembski as it's Executive Director. ISCID appears to be defunct as an organization and PCID was last published in November 2005. It is not known whether ISCID has maintained their tony offices in Princeton. However, take a look at how the other side lived. Jealous Darwinoids?
> Casey opened by stating his premise that reasonable people can disagree and we should all strive to stick to the issues and engage in civil dialogue. As I will discuss later, and as you all undoubtedly already know, Casey's reach exceeded his grasp relative to this goal.
> The talk was broken down into two sections. A critique of the Kitzmiller v Dover decision (Forgive me for spoiling the surprise, but he didn't like it. :O ) and a discussion of the need for academic freedom bills.
> He plans to challenge Judge Jones KvD decision based on 5 fronts:
o ID and the Supernatural
o Peer review
o ID Testing and Research
o Contrived Dualism
o Why inaccurate
> His first point is it was that the statement in question in Dover was just one short paragraph. Wafer thin.
> He disagreed with some, but not all of it. He didn't say what he disagreed with.
> He said the policy was unconstitutional and the DI opposed mandating ID. I could use some confirmation from anyone else in attendance. It seems odd that they have spent 3 years flailing away at a decision they agree was, on the constitutionality issue, correctly decided. I know they are pissed at Jones for deciding on the "is it science issue", but surely they must have challenged him at some point on deciding constitutionality wrong.
> He challenged Jones statement that ID violated methodological naturalism and invoked the supernatural. He used quotes from Pandas and People to show the book stayed on the correct side of the demarcation issue. One quote was from page 7. I think I did locate the quote independently (emphasis mine). It reads "If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. But what kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy. But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist. This is no different, really, than if we discovered life did result from natural causes. We still would not know, from science, if the natural cause was all that was involved, or if the ultimate explanation was beyond nature, and using the natural cause." From my read of this quote, in particular the word "must", they are assuming that the designer is supernatural. This seems to fly in the face of the notion that ID only detects design and doesn't seek to determine the identity, methods or motives of the designer. They have already shown that they have drawn a conclusion about the designer, specifically that he/she is outside nature.
> He mentions SETI and archeology doing design detection.
> He accuses Jones of quote mining Pandas. In particular the phrase I bolded above. He says the next sentence (which I include above) changes the context and refutes Jones.
> He turned to the issues revolving around the pre-publication drafts of OPAP. Presumably this is the "cdesign proponentists" issue. He says we will hear all about it fron Nick Matzke later. But, he wants to show the quotes. This is where Luskin's poorly designed (heh! ) presentation material gets in the way of understanding his point. He wants to show how the pubs changed over time (double heh! ) but his charts are constructed in such a way that you can't honestly see what he is trying to show.
> He complains that the evolutionists draw a link back to Paley. But ID doesn't go back to Paley, because Paley invoked the supernatural and ID is only about the science. Here is where I think we can beat Luskin over the head with West. Recall here where West said ID goes back to the Greeks and Romans. I believe the Greeks and Romans posited gods as designers. If that can be confirmed then West and Luskin are contradicting each other. Casey may also want to talk to the brain trust over at Uncommon Descent, who say on their comment policy page: ID is a modern scientific offshoot of philosophic arguments from design such as Aristotle’s first cause and Paley’s watchmaker, which predate unconstitutional creation science by thousands and hundreds of years respectively.
> Some master intellect is the creator of life. Can't say if natural or supernatural. OPAP sticks to empirical domain. It even said that you can't eliminate the supernatural because you cannot learn about it through sensory experience.
> Casey says that OPAP was about something substantially different than creationism prior to Edwards v. Aguillard. Thaxton was not comfortable with typical creationist vocabulary and didn't want to bring God into it. Even if we take Luskin's claim that the change from creationism to intelligent design predated E v A, I still don't find that they wanted to change the vocabulary a compelling argument. Vocabularly? Seriously?
> He turns to the KvD trial transcript and two different questions to Minnich about the supernatural. Both times Minnich says ID is not about the supernatural.
> What about Behe. He shows a quote from (presumably) one of Behe's books disclaiming ID is supernatural. He shows an exchange from Behe's testimony. Where Behe says it is not accurate that ID holds that the designer is God. For obvious reasons, Luskin didn't bring up the astrology testimony.
> Casey now turns to Jones statement that there was no peer-reviewed ID articles. Jones said it 5 times! He puts a list up that showed 5-6 supposedly peer reviewed ID papers, including Stephen Meyer's infamous paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The second paper was authored by Donnig. I didn't catch the others because Casey changed slides quickly. He says Jones made all of them disappear. 5 or 6 papers Casey? That is it? How many papers supporting, or premised upon, evolutionary theory are published every year?
That is all for tonight. More tomorrow night hopefully.
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It's natural to be curious about our world, but the scientific method is just one theory about how to best understand it. We live in a democracy, which means we should treat every theory equally. - Steven Colbert, I Am America (and So Can You!)
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