All Intensive Purposes

While I was looking at Hugh Hewitt transcripts -- not a place I usually find myself, let's say -- I noticed this show in which law professors Erwin Chemerinsky (Duke) and John Eastman (Chapman) talk about the decision in the ID trial out of Pennsylvania. At one point, Hewitt asks Eastman whether the trial judge "is asserting that any theistic point of view presented in public schools ... is unconstitutional." (The transcript is unclear -- the elided text may have been a suggested that such a point of view might be valid.)

Eastman responded:

Well, he is. But he's also wrong about the evidence in the case. I mean, there were a number of witnesses in that case that offered non-revealed theistic explanations. The whole point of intelligent design is applying the traditional methods...scientific methods that Darwin himself applied...that they think that the best hypothesis is that there has to be some intelligent moving force in the universe that has created life, that it couldn't have originated out of nothing. And they do this down at the sub-molecular level, looking at the design of components of the neutrons of life, and see the uncanny resemblance that it bears to Bill Gates' design of a silicon chip. And this repeats itself over and over and over in nature. And Darwin's theories end up with such significant gaps that they, at the end of the day, don't make an explanation of this, that the best scientific conclusion is there must be an intelligent designer behind this.

For starters, you have to admire the hubris of a professor who can sit in Orange County, on the other side of the country, and opine that a federal trial judge in Pennsylvania was "wrong about the evidence" presented in the courtroom in front of him. I have a hard time imagining that Eastman spent a twentieth of the time that Judge Jones spent reviewing that evidence.

But more fundamentally, there's the whopper that Intelligent Design applies "traditional, scientific methods." Um, no. Anyone who says that "the best scientific conclusion is [that] there must be an intelligent designer" is either exceptionally ignorant -- and recklessly so, to be sharing that ignorance on a radio show -- or propagandizing. From what I've seen of Professor Eastman, I do not believe that he is an ignorant fellow. Either way, I'm glad I'm not investing my money in a law degree from Chapman.

(Chemerinsky doesn't seem to have corrected this; nevertheless, he's no wanker.)