CA Science Center Sued for Info by Intelligent Design Group

By The Christian Post on December 4th, 2009

imagesbannerscp_120x1201Reprinted by permission of the Christian Post

By Nathan Black|Christian Post Reporter

The Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, has filed a petition against the California Science Center for refusing to disclose certain public documents.

The petition comes after the American Freedom Alliance filed a lawsuit against the science center for canceling a contract to screen a pro-intelligent design video at the center’s IMAX Theater.

California Science Center (Photo credit: Richard Kim)

California Science Center (Photo credit: Richard Kim)

Following the cancellation, the Discovery Institute requested the center to release public documents under the California Public Records Act. On Nov. 2, the center released 44 pages of documents and claimed no documents were withheld, except some personal information such as telephone numbers and email addresses.

However, the intelligent design think tank contends the claims are false and that some e-mail communications, including ones with the Smithsonian Institution – which allegedly expressed angst over the screening – and ones by decision makers, were not disclosed.

“The Center withheld public communications by decision makers who cancelled the contract with AFA,” said Casey Luskin, program officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute. “We believe the reason the California Science Center withheld these public documents is simple: the e-mails show evidence of discrimination against the pro-intelligent design viewpoint.”

The film, “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record,” had been scheduled to be shown at the California Science Center on Oct. 25. The Los Angeles premiere was being sponsored by the AFA.

“Darwin’s Dilemma” is the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media. It explores the Cambrian explosion, “when in a moment of geological time complex animals first appeared on earth fully formed, without evidence of any evolutionary ancestors.” Some of the scientists interviewed in the film propose the theory of intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the appearance of animal life in the Cambrian period.

Pro-evolution film “We Are Born of the Stars” was also scheduled to be shown to provide balance to a discussion about life’s origin after the screening.

However, early in October, the center canceled its contract with the AFA, according to the Discovery Institute. The AFA alleges in its lawsuit that museum officials were fearful of having intelligent design discussed in any context.

AFA says its free speech rights were violated and alleges that CSC officials “conspired to drop the event because they did not want the museum to be viewed as legitimizing intelligent design as a scientific theory.”

A request was made to the center for the release of public documents.

Among some of the documents obtained, one e-mail sent by University of Southern California professor Hilary Schor on Oct. 6 states, “I’m less troubled by the freedom of speech issues [i.e., the suppression of freedom of speech] than why my tax dollars which support the California Science Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda!”

Another document shows Ken Phillips, a curator at the CSC, stating, “I personally have a real problem with anything that elevates the concept of intelligent design to a level that makes it appear as though it should be considered equally alongside Darwinian theory as a possible alternative to natural selection. In other words, I see us getting royally played by the Center for Science and Culture resulting in long term damage to our credibility and judgment for a very long time. … No institute supporting an essentially religious philosophy of creation is required to assure that appropriate critique comes to bear on the Darwinian theory.”

AFA and the Discovery Institute argue that the cancellation was a result of discrimination and “intolerance for the scientific viewpoint expressed and scientific content contained in ‘Darwin’s Dilemma.’”

“[I]t is a fundamental principle of First Amendment jurisprudence that when a governmental entity or sub-unit (such as CSC) opens its facilities as a public forum, it is not constitutionally permissible to censor speech based on viewpoint or content,” the think tank maintains.

The California Science Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is a public-private partnership between the State of California and the not-for-profit California Science Center Foundation.

Copyright 2009 The Christian Post. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Note: Reader comments are reviewed before publishing, and only salient comments that add to the topic will be published. Profanity is absolutely not allowed and will be summarily deleted. Spam, copied statements and other material not comprised of the reader’s own opinion will also be deleted.

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Categories: News
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  • PaulBurnett
    In recent news pertinent to the question of whether intelligent design is science or religion, intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer has just been awarded WORLD MAGAZINE’s “Person of the Year” - http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-desi...

    This would be a bit more meaningful if World Magazine was a science magazine - but World Magazine is a “Christian news magazine,” with a declared perspective of conservative evangelical Protestantism. Its mission statement is “To report, interpret, and illustrate the news…from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.”

    This award from a Biblical literalist magazine provides one more illustration of the strong connection between intelligent design and religion - not science.
  • Well, I suppose if evolutionism is a religion (and it is--it has all the major elements of a religion: exercise of faith, attempting to answer questions of ultimate origin with or without solid scientific evidence, etc.), then it would be fair to say that intelligent design also has a connection to religion.
  • RickK
    Bob Ellis said: "attempting to answer questions of ultimate origin with or without solid scientific evidence"

    Nice strawman, Bob, but evolution merely says species evolve from earlier species. Evolutionary theory does not offer an explanation for how the first life formed. Similarly, chemistry doesn't explain where the elements came from - do you deny that chemistry works, Bob?

    As for your statement that evolution lacks evidence. I guess you can say that if you ignore: the fossil record, DNA, shared ERV markers, molecular functional redundancy, shared morphology, the relationship of biogeography to geology and plate tectonics, dating methods, observed speciation, mutations, atavisms, vestigial organs, and physics.

    If you ignore all those, Bob, then you can say evolution has no evidence.

    Why are you so afraid of the possibility that you evolved? Why are facts and evidence so disposable in your world view?
  • It's not a strawman at all. Everyone knows that evolution theory and evolutionists arrogantly claim to know this...until someone calls them on it and suddenly, oh no, we don't claim to answer that. Good one!

    As to your so-called "evidence," you make the same mistake virtually every evolutionist makes: confusing facts with assumptions about facts.

    You look at the fossil record and claim it proves vast ages and evolution (despite the fact that no organisms today sit around perfectly intact for hundreds or thousands of years while sediment perfectly preserves them); I look at the fossil record and see huge numbers of organisms quickly and catastrophically buried in the cataclysm of the global flood described in genesis, deposited in layers that generally (but not consistently) conform to the complexity of those organisms because the more complex (and mobile) organisms would have been able to avoid the flood waters for longer and thus be buried at higher points in the mud/rock layers.

    You see a rock that radiometric dating tells you (conveniently) is millions of years old (provided the reading is inconvenient, in which case it's simply tossed) when such dating methods make a host of assumptions that must all be correct in order to obtain an accurate reading (e.g. the decay rate must have been constant over the entire course of the theoretical millions of years--something you couldn't count on for 1,000 years much less a million or more--, the sample must not have been contaminated with an outside source of the daughter element, nothing must have leeched away daughter or parent element, etc.). It's also quite interesting that 20-year old rock has been dated at anywhere from a few hundred thousand years to 2.8 million years depending on which dating method has been used, and that C14 dating has calculated living or freshly killed organisms at thousands of years old. In short, even though we know radiometric dating is unreliable with verifiable samples, we are supposed to believe radiometric dating is completely reliable when we cannot verify the age of the allegedly ancient sample. How convenient...but not very scientific.

    I used to believe in evolution...until I started doing some investigation for myself and learned about its tremendous weaknesses, flawed assumptions (which is 90% or more of what the theory is based on), and how illogical and unscientific are many of its key tenets.

    Fortunately I also learned that creation science, while also making assumptions, fits the evidence much better, with far less inconsistency and none of the illogic evolution theory relies on to be "workable."

    You might give the matter a try at objective examination sometime...if you dare. It was disconcerting for me to realize I had placed my faith in a lot of overblown assumptions, but at that point I had to ask myself: do I keep believing this for convenience sake, or do I take the big step away from the herd and embrace what makes much more sense? As Lord John Maynard Keynes put it, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
  • PaulBurnett
    Bob Ellis wrote "I look at the fossil record and see huge numbers of organisms quickly and catastrophically buried in the cataclysm of the global flood described in genesis..."

    I look at the salt deposits under the Dead Sea - the Sedom Formation - over a MILE thick, formed by the salty ocean evaporating and drying, over a period of millions of years to get that thick - and in a way utterly unexplainable by Flood Geology.

    I look at the salt deposits under the seabed rock of the Mediterranean, layers of salt underneath layers of rock, followed by more rock and more salt - all deposited over millions of years, in ways that Flood Geology cannot explain.

    I look at the annual sediment layers ("varves") that occur in large lakes. The varve record from Lake Baikal shows five million annual sediment layers; the Green River formation shows 20,000,000 annual sediment layers. These seasonal layers are separated by the pollen of each spring; when compressed under further deposits, these layers turn into shale and slate (that is why shale and slate split into flat layers so easily). Flood Geology has no explanation for varves which have been forming for millions of years before Noah's Flood of 2348 BC or Creation in 4004 BC.

    These scientific facts and many others, objectively examined, make much more sense than the creation mythology of Genesis.
  • You think those salt deposits under the Dead Sea were formed over a period of millions of years, but you don't know that. And you also only think they are unexplainable by Flood geology--if the global flood was even responsible for them at all (hint: it could have been other causes since that time).

    You also think deposits under the Med took millions of years to be laid down, but you don't know that, just as you don't know Flood geology (or something else) can't explain it.

    I could go on, but by now it's pretty obvious that you are as obtuse as pretty much every other evolutionist, in that you are totally incapable of distinguishing fact from assumption and separating things that you think from things that you know.

    Until you can figure that out, it's a waste of your time and mine to continue any farther.
  • PaulBurnett
    Nathan Black's article states "AFA and the Discovery Institute argue that the cancellation was a result of discrimination and “intolerance for the scientific viewpoint expressed and scientific content contained in" an anti-Darwin and anti-evolution film.

    Unfortunately, the "viewpoint expressed" in the film is not clearly scientific; the "content contained" in the film is clearly not scientific. And the California Science Center has every right to refuse to show an anti-science propaganda film.

    The Discovery Institute has had years to find some actual science to support intelligent design, and it hasn't been able to find any. So they have resorted to publishing in religious publications and presenting at religious venues, because there are no actual science publications that will publish their non-scientific material, and there are no actual science conferences where they can present their non-scientific material. But they keep trying.
  • dcm
    Anti-evolutionism is "unscientific" ONLY if you define "scientific" to specifically exclude anti-evolutionism -- which is what both Mr. Burnett & Mr. Phillips are doing here.

    The real point of all this is that evolutionists have to protect their unscientific, philosophically-based doctrine any way they can, because it shrivels when exposed to the light of critical scrutiny. They cannot defend it in any realm where free discussion is permitted, so they have to resort to censorship in order to prevent such discussion. Part of their strategy is demonstrated here by Mr. Phillips: pretend evolutionism has long since passed the test of hard, scientific proof and thus cannot be questioned. But any honest inquirer will easily discover that it has not passed any such test -- indeed, it has failed virtually every test it can possibly be given. Its only success is in the area of popularity.
  • PaulBurnett
    "dcm" wrote "(evolution) has failed virtually every test it can possibly be given."

    Have you by any chance read Dr. Neil Shubin's book "Your Inner Fish"? Dr. Shubin tested evolution by using it to figure out where to find Tiktaalik's fossils - and evolution passed the test. (Or have your read Dr. Shubin's book?)

    "dcm" wrote "The fossil record has not produced the kind of transitions that it should."

    This is another creationist claim that has been proven wrong time and again. For instance, there were many transitional fossils discussed in Dr. Kevin Padian's expert witness sworn testimony given in the 2005 Dover trial (which we all understand that intelligent design proponents and creationists would rather forget). Dr. Padian's testimony transcript and slideshow is available on-line at http://ncse.com/news/2007/05/meet-padians-critt...

    "dcm" wrote "The real point of all this is that evolutionists have to protect their unscientific, philosophically-based doctrine..."

    This is almost laughable - if evolution is (as you claim) "unscientific" then are you saying that creationism IS scientific? Can you define the term "science" in a way that excludes evolution but includes creationism (and presumably astrology, as Michael Behe famously conceded in the 2005 Dover trial)?
  • dcm
    (1) How did "evolution pass the test" because someone found a fish fossil (that, BTW, proves nothing)? Please elaborate.
    (2) No, the lack of true transitional fossils is a simple fact that excuses have been made for time & time again. Every so-called "transitional" fossil has had that label slapped on it while utterly failing to prove anything. There are none that clearly fall between major types, and none that show "nascent" organs in the process of developing. (And if you're using Tiktaalik as an example of "transitional", you're just showing how much homework you haven't done.)
    (3) The definition of "science" is "truth." That's enough to exclude evolutionism right there.

    Like most of us, you have seen how evidence can be interpreted as if evolutionism were true. But you fail to see that there's all the difference in the world between that and evolutionism actually being *proven*. All the same evidence can also be interpreted as if creation science is true, and guess what -- doing so reduces the problems and gaps-to-be-filled-by-speculation *drastically*. If you think creationists are ignorant rubes, you have a lot to learn.
  • PaulBurnett
    "dcm" wrote "How did "evolution pass the test" because someone found a fish fossil (that, BTW, proves nothing)? Please elaborate."

    You didn't read the book, did you? Dr. Shubin predicted (the essence of actual science - as opposed to creationism - is making predictions ("hypotheses") and then seeing if they are true) the transitional fossils he was looking for would be in a certain rock strata, figured out where that rock strata was exposed (in Canada) and went there and found the fossils where he predicted they would be. Read the book - it's described at http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/book.html

    "dcm" wrote "There are none (transitional fossils) that clearly fall between major types, and none that show "nascent" organs in the process of developing."

    That's simply not true. You didn't look at Dr. Padian's slideshow, did you? Whether it's the hoofs of horses or the disappearing legs of whales, there's lots of transitional fossils. You can see them if you look for them. Or if, like Dr. Theo, you haven't looked at any scientific journals or other scientific publications in the last 150 years, you won't see them. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.

    "dcm" wrote "The definition of "science" is "truth.""

    I prefer "a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts" - which certainly leaves out creationism. Is creationism "science"? Is astrology "science"?
  • Does it not trouble you that your opinions come without even basic understanding of the controversy? Do you understand what is meant by the “Cambrian Explosion?” Do you understand the implications of these observations?

    You say, Mr. Burnett, that “Unfortunately, the ‘viewpoint expressed’ in the film is not clearly scientific; the ‘content contained’ in the film is clearly not scientific.” That opinion, I assume, is based upon a thorough review of the film? Or is that the opinion of talkorigins.org?

    “The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion.” – Stephen Jay Gould, Paleontologist

    In as much as no breakthroughs in evolutionary understanding have ensued in the past 150 years that shed light on the evolutionary dilemma of the Cambrian Explosion, you apparently think that mentioning this fact constitutes heresy that must be suppressed at all costs. Yours is not a very objective or scientific point of view, Mr. Burnett, but is typical of the zealotry seen among the true believers that are threatened by anything that brings their religious convictions into question.
  • PaulBurnett
    Dr. Theo wrote: "Do you understand what is meant by the “Cambrian Explosion?” Do you understand the implications of these observations?"

    Unlike Biblical literalists who posit a 6,000-year-old earth with creation in 4004 BC, I do have some understanding of the now known to be mis-named "Cambrian Explosion," which occurred half a million years ago over a period now understood to have lasted several tens of millions of years - hardly an "explosion." (The "Cambrian Explosion" poses a much harder problem for creationists, as it occurred long before creation.)

    And in the last few decades, actual science and actual scientists have discovered more life existed during the Pre-Cambrian period than was realized during Darwin's life over a century, and even during Gould's life - and regurgitating decades-old quotes from Gould in light of more recent discoveries does not add to the discussion.

    There was an incredible "diversity of pre-trilobite fossils from the Precambrian, from the prokaryotes 3.5 b.y. ago, to the Doushantuo fossils of China (600 m.y. ago) which include embryos of sponges, cnidarians, and several bilaterian groups, to the multicellular soft-bodied Ediacaran fauna (580-550 m.y. ago), which are clearly large (some over a meter in size) but possess no skeletonized tissues, to the “little shellies” of the first two stages of the Cambrian, which include clear examples of primitive mollusks, sponges, cnidarians, and other groups, but are minimally skeletonized. Only during the third stage of the Cambrian, the Atdabanian (520 m.y. ago) do we see abundantly skeletonized fossils like trilobites." - from Don Prothero, reporting on a recent debate with evolution denialist Stephen Meyers at http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2009/12/no-long...

    Dr. Theo then throws out another hoary creationist chestnut, "In as much as no breakthroughs in evolutionary understanding have ensued in the past 150 years..." Come now, Dr. Theo - in the last 150 years or so have you read any articles in any actual science journals such as "Science" or "Nature" or "Cell" or "Genetics"? There has been a steadily accelerating increase in breakthroughs in evolutionary understanding - denying this fact is to deny history.

    Dr. Theo asked "That opinion (on Illustra Media's film "Darwin's Dilemma"), I assume, is based upon a thorough review of the film? Or is that the opinion of talkorigins.org?"

    No, it's based on a review of the creationist origins of "Illustra Media," also known as "Discovery Media," an overtly evangelistic religious media company, as presented by "New Mexicans for Science and Reason" at http://www.nmsr.org/smkg-gun.htm - read the webpage to see proof of the connection between intelligent design and creationism.
  • PaulBurnett
    Yikes - typo alert - I just realized I wrote the Cambrian "Explosion" took place a half-million years ago - it was a half-BILLION years ago. That's WAY before 4004 BC, but the creationists still love mentioning it.
  • dcm
    Unfortunately you are not citing "discoveries," but merely new-and-improved speculation for the purpose of attempting to bridge the chasm between the evidence and the hypothesis-that-no-evidence-must-challenge.

    And while Dr. Theo's statement about "no breakthroughs" may seem a bit broad, the simple fact is that the things that would *really* prove evolution (molecules-to-man evolution, not just simple "change") have not been discovered -- in the last 150 years or any other time. The fossil record has not produced the kind of transitions that it should. New genetic code has not been found to be potentially written by any natural means. And on and on. Evolutionists have come up with some pretty impressive excuses for all this, but all that shows that they will let nothing challenge their preconceived ideas. Shame on you for buying these excuses.
  • RickK
    "the things that would *really* prove evolution (molecules-to-man evolution, not just simple "change") have not been discovered"

    Oh just stop. Now you've moved the goalposts so far that the only evidence you will accept for evolution is if science blends some primordial soup and creates a walking talking human out of it.

    We don't have to SEE Mt. Everest form to understand that it happened a little at a time, over a long period, with no need for divine magic.

    Besides, dcm - DNA evidence beats eye-witness evidence in every court in this nation.

    The verdict is in. YOU EVOLVED FROM EARLIER LIFE FORMS. No matter how you may wish to interpret your favorite ancient tribal campfire stories, you evolved from things that were furry and had hands for feet. In fact, you evolved from slimy little squirmy things in the bottom of the ocean.

    Don't be afraid of that fact. Rather, try to embrace your small part in this glorious web of life on our beautiful planet.
  • Ben
    dr. theo, the Cambrian explosion was not the sudden appearance of life, it was a period of rapid genetic variation that took place over a period of 80 million years. The quote from Gould was referring to the problem when Darwin was writing that no pre-Cambrian life had yet been discovered (which we have found plenty of today), you've taken the quote completely out of context. And to say that there has been no scientific breakthrough made on evolution and the Cambrian explosion is the result of your lack of knowledge (see the work of Knoll and Carroll; Towe; Catling, Glein, Zhanle, and McCay, for example).
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