Did Richard Dawkins Hand Creationists Their Next School Strategy?

[rug]

BY ADAM SHAPIRO JUNE 15, 2016

Since the 1990s the Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank, has tried to make it easier to teach intelligent design in public schools. They have had some successes, and one big setback: in 2005, the Institute and its allies lost Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a landmark case that ruled it unconstitutional to teach intelligent design (ID) in public classrooms.

The Discovery Institute denies that the decade since Kitzmiller has been disappointing for them. Still, while the past ten years have seen some success for the intelligent design movement, it has not become the culture-sweeping campaign that some of its founders envisioned.

A recent law review article by legal scholar Casey Luskin, though, outlines a new position that might help bring intelligent design into the classroom—or at least back into the courts. Luskin’s strategy capitalizes on one of the thornier claims in the Kitzmiller decision, and it demonstrates how rhetoric used by New Atheists can sometimes backfire, actually making it easier to challenge evolution-only curricula in courts.

Luskin, until recently a staffer at the Discovery Institute, argues that a key, decades-old legal test has been applied inconsistently. Weakening the test, or throwing out the way it has been applied to ID, could reopen the legal question of teaching ID in public school classrooms.

http://religiondispatches.org/did-richard-dawkins-hand-creationists-their-next-school-strategy/

http://www.discovery.org/f/12038

https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file577_23137.pdf

[Hoppy]

1. If I was designed intelligently, I would have a third arm coming from out the middle of my chest.

That would be so's I could hold packages and open the car door at the same time.

[rug]

2. I would have a detachable homunculus to do that for me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

When a New Atheist figurehead like Richard Dawkins claims that Darwin made it possible to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” he substantiates the claim that evolution itself is not neutral when it comes to promoting or inhibiting religion.
...
But Luskin argues not just that atheists have found evolution to be useful, but that evolution in itself is inherently anti-religious. This claim doesn’t hold up. He’s right that there is a history of anti-religious invocation of evolution, but there’s also a long history of attempts to reconcile evolution and traditional religion, going back to Darwin himself.

And Dawkins didn't say evolution must make one an "intellectually fulfilled atheist", but that it made it possible. And Dawkins said that in 1986, so it's not as if this is something new for creationists/IDists to try out.

[rug]

4. "As with similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's Law), it is intended as a humorous adage rather than always

being literally true. (3)"

"3. Dawkins, pp. 220-222"