dover...relief

judge john jones III increased my trust in the justice system today. a republican (bush 41) appointee, jones put idealogy aside and made the right constitutional ruling today in yesterday's dover, pa ruling.

jones made a broad, definitive ruling that tells the proponents of creationsim
irrational design flying spaghetti monster (un) intelligent design that their beliefs belong at home, not in the schools. i don't have a problem with intelligent design itself. honestly, it might even be true (the universe is cerrtainly mysterious and wonderous and i understand very little about it). however, it's a personal belief. it's not falsifiable. it's therefore not a hypothesis. you can poke all the holes you want in evolution (and there a bunch), but b/c hypothesis "a" is wrong, it doesn't mean hypothesis "b" is right. it just means that the null hypothesis is true. i couldn't believe my ears when i heard a fellow harvard-educated friend say that he doesn't understand why people are against pointing our flaws in evolution. if you believe evolution is false, then a number of alternatives are true:

• hinduism: brahma (not a creator, but more of a force) was the originator of the universe. the gods arrived after the beginning (yes, plural. gods. imagine that being taught in the schools)
• islam: dukhan (loosely, translated, a smoky mass) was all there was
• roman: in the beginning, is started with the elemental forces of Chaos, from which the titans emerged. the olympian gods (zeus, etc) came from the titans
• flying spaghetti monster
  

now, have the ID folks scientifically tested these alternatives to determine which one is more valid? do you think parents may have a desire to not have certain beliefs taught in their taxpayer-funded schools? that is why intelligent design belongs at home and not at school.

sorry for the diatribe.

there are so many problems with teaching intelligent design in the schools that i'm not going to going to catalog them here. instead, professor rosenhouse's evolution blog does a great job of explaining the argument and dissecting judge jone's opinon.