The Questionable Authority has a post about Judge Jones' Dover ruling, correcting some misunderstandings of the reasoning behind the ruling. However, in so doing, TQA himself unwittingly misleads his audience. On the rationale behind the ruling, he writes:

Judge Jones concluded, rightly, that Intelligent Design is not science. The religious motivations of ID proponents were only one of many pieces of evidence leading to that conclusion. The most compelling evidence for this conclusion is actually totally unrelated to the motivations, religious or otherwise, of ID proponents: the ID people, according to the testimony of pro-ID defense witnesses, haven't done science. They have not been able to devise or conduct any experiment that would be a positive test of Intelligent Design. That is why ID is not science.

But TQA is leaving out a very important part of Judge Jones' decision. From the ruling:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

Obviously, it is this last paragraph that TQA is referring to. But what about the "three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science" We can ignore level two and three, as there could be formulations of intelligent design that didn't position itself against evolution and which didn't rely solely on "negative attacks" to make its case. That leaves us with level number one: "ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation." Remember, it isn't enough that ID supporters say that the designer could be natural, as this would still permit the possibility that it isn't.

TQA has missed a golden opportunity to educate his readers about the nature of science. Instead of emphasizing the lack of experiments confirming intelligent design, he should have said: "There are currently no experiments confirming intelligent design. But even if there was, it wouldn't matter, as intelligent design violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation. ID suppporters could fill up every science journal in the world with experimental evidence confirming intelligent design, but we would still have to conclude that it's unscientific, as it allows for the possibility of a supernatural designer." After all, we can't have people walking around being confused about science.

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