Legal working paper: Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution

Ed Brayton announced:

Steven Gey, Matthew Brauer and Barbara Forrest have published a new working paper on SSRN, Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution.

Some quotes of interest:

Intelligent design theory relies on a series of misunderstandings and misrepresentations of evolutionary theory, and the multiple flaws in the structure and details of intelligent design theory render it irredeemably flawed as science.

My thoughts exactly and the view of more and more people as well.

The only method that ID advocates have devised for identifying these objects is in the form of a negative argument by elimination. That is, they rely on the false assertion that either some current naturalistic model for the origin of an object is correct, or that their “intelligent design” inference is. This negative argumentation has substantial problems, not least of which is that it relies upon a false dichotomy. Even if all currently known mechanisms for an object’s origin are not convincing, other undiscovered scenarios are certainly possible.

The 'God of the Gaps' argument is both scientifically and religiously speaking devastating.

In Dembski’s filter “design” does not have its usual meaning, but rather is defined negatively as “the set-theoretic complement of the disjunction of regularity-or-chance.”290 This means that design is by default anything that is not the product of either regularity or chance.

Del Ratzsch pointed this one out...