Gotcha

Last year about this time, a federal judge ruled that the Dover, PA school board could not mandate that a statement about intelligent design be read in their school’s biology classes. He not only ruled that the decision was unconstitutional, he also went on at length about how terrible and unscientific intelligent design is.

He was lauded in the media for how deep and thoughtful his ruling was.

But a couple days ago, the Discovery Institute released this report, which shows without a doubt that Judge Jones plagiarized his decision from documents given him by the ACLU. He even included mistakes made by the ACLU documents.

Does this place the ruling in jeopardy? Not to my knowledge. But it is highly ironic. Intelligent Design is based on specified complexity. When we study something that is complex (not simple, brief or repetitive) and specified (not random like a bunch of Scrabble tiles pulled from a bag), we have evidence that an intelligent agent is at work.

This is the very method used to detect plagiarism. If a written piece is extended and matches up too closely with something else, we can be confident that one of them is not original. I bet Judge Jones wishes he had actually studied ID before he decided to use his computer’s cut and paste feature.