I don’t have a television set — just a projector connected to a computer, which is plenty good for movies but not so great for tapping the airwaves — so my impression of NOVA’s new program, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, has been mostly textual. I say “mostly,” because I did see the trailer:
PBS promises us that the whole thing will be available ontube this Friday.
The National Center for Science Education is pleased with Judgment Day, and that’s a recommendation which carries a lot of weight. Still, they’re an awfully Web 1.0 lot over there, so what do we suave cyber-philosophes have to say?
PZ Myers and the Pharynguloids watched the show last night, live-blagging as they went along. Then, this morning, PZ observed that the Discovery Institute’s response was a regurgitation of old whines which managed to miss the point of the program entirely. (EDIT: Tyler DiPietro has some details.)
Greg Laden, who also live-blagged the broadcast (1, 2, 3, 4) has an overview and a couple complaints — nothing fatal; he enjoyed the show, but in a few respects, the producers could have made a good thing even better.
Meanwhile, Dave Bacon is complaining that the biologists are having all the fun. Where are the epic court battles over quantum physics? Come on, you pansy Vedic Shiva-botherers, bring it on!
Actually, the purveyors of quantum woo are probably just too busy raping our medical establishment and leaving it dying in the gutter, bound with electrical tape. They don’t have time to worry about subverting the public schools, too.
But enough gloom for now. Look, over there, Rebecca is happy!
UPDATE (15 November): Looks like PBS put the video up early.
Actually, I felt the ‘reenactments’ were rather bloodless and was disappointed by the DI’s non-participation. Really, they are such liars—but they’re also lawyers, and so they spin their non-participation as the result of a conspiracy against them. Which is true, in the sense that it is a conspiracy of truth-tellers. The Dover board members who fudged under oath come across more sympathetically than you might think, simply because they did participate in the documentary and expressed some real human emotion. Board members Bonsall and Buckingham come across as not very bright people whose prior beliefs made them vulnerable to exploitation by the Thomas More Law Center and the DI, both of which failed to discourage them from the sort of conduct that would expose them to legal challenge. The TMLC stuck it out because they believed (incorrectly) they could defend the Board’s actions; the DI lawyers, more interested in how the trial’s outcome would affect their agenda, figured out very early on that even if the Board’s public action could be construed as constitutional, the private religious motivation of both the Board and the parties that encouraged it would not. So they pulled out, like octopi, in a cloud of ink. (Sorry, Pharynguloids!)
So, I’m still not satisfied with this public beatdown because guys like Dembski, Meyer etc. are just not made to squirm as they should. What’s really needed is that they need to be captured in public debate making a fool of themselves, and have their folly widely disseminated. Unfortunately, that will require a high-stakes matchup that’s unlikely to occur, for a number of reasons. Call me foolish, call me obsessed, but it’s just so unsatisfying to see their spin machine in heavy rotation. So I double-dog dare them, here.