Analysis: Reaction to the Results

The court firmly established that ID was a religious doctrine, and thus could not be taught in public schools. This finding was primarily centered upon the history of the ID movement and its previous history regarding creationist science.

The court also firmly established that ID was not, in any way, science, and that the definition of science would need to change to allow the supernatural causation that ID requires.

Of note: "it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research."

The court is establishing that a communal acceptance is important for support for a scientific theory, similar to arguments put forth by John Tyndall's Double Boundary Work. The court is also establishing that the nature of peer-reviewed publications is fundamental to the progress of science, and that testing and research is necessary for supporting a scientific theory. Latour would probably argue that our labs, our methods, and our scientific structure should be analyzed and argued, let alone the nature of scientific inquiry, but that may have been beyond the scope of this case.

The ACLU posits that "intelligent design, which cannot be tested by any scientific method...is inherently a religious argument that falls outside the realm of science." Once again, the definition of what science is and isn't, a thought pattern that can be explored through the application of Latour and his contemporaries. Latour would probably argue that the act of science is a black box unto itself, and that this case may have opened it, and promptly shut it after discovering that all the pieces were, in fact, in order. In this trial, we have gone far, far upstream into the arguments for evolution, in fact, into the arguments for religious theory versus scientific theory, for spiritual explanations versus natural and observable explanations. There is no further upstream we could go in this argument other than questioning our very observations and senses.

The Thomas Moore Law Center seeks to minimize the damage from the ruling, and takes a downstream approach to their response. Arguing that there are flaws in the theory of evolution, and that ID answers those flaws, they minimize the upstream scientific arguments that are not in their favor. Additionally, they argue that the law itself is insufficient and improperly applied, thus seeking to open up another black box.