Larry Caldwell has a history of suing in California courts for creationist causes. Mike Dunford has some material on the latest attempt to claim that leaving out Christian myths was “viewpoint discrimination”, and in particular on their interesting choice of a star witness.

The Christian schools hired Dr. Behe (for $20,000) as an expert in “biology and physics.” (That second part should make Chad and Rob’s heads explode, given that Behe has absolutely no physics experience of any kind.) To earn his fee, Dr. Behe prepared a report that said, basically, that the Christian textbooks are excellent works for high school students. He also defended that view in a deposition that was taken back at the end of May.

Wooeee, that Behe fella has a real racket going. No wonder he’s so committed to his absurd version of creationism — there’s profit in it.

Anyway, Chad and Rob can break out the superglue and reassemble their crania now, and use a pastry gun to reinject their splattered brains. The case has been dismissed.

I’m sure Mr Caldwell will be back next month, filing another frivolous lawsuit. I’m also sure the Discovery Institute will be very, very quiet about this new failure in their history of legal shenanigans.

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Oops. Behe was testifying in a different case in California. How many suits are the creationists involved in, anyway? Wesley has the rundown on the correct legal case.

A couple of graduate students have a group called Extant Dodos Productions that uses YouTube to rip into creationist claims. In particular they’ve used some of Kent Hovind’s materials to dissect his arguments. It’s a clever idea — they take creationist videos and edit them to insert rebuttals to each argument as they are made.

Apparently, though, Creation Science Evangelism doesn’t like the fact that their claims are being popularly weighed, analyzed, and pulverized, and they’re now trying to strong-arm Extant Dodos Productions with intimidating letters that say they are infringing on their copyright by using their videos. It seems to me that this work certainly ought to fit under the conventions of fair use, but they have an even stronger case: the videos they used all come with a formal waiver of copyright with the stipulation that the material not be sold.

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Creationists sure are sneaky little liars, aren’t they? Here’s an account of a theologian who was suckered by a creationist film crew — now he’s on a DVD that mangles his ideas and postures for young earth creationism and biblical literalism.

Dishonesty must be a universal property of creationists.

Richard Colling is in big trouble. He’s a biology instructor who is getting slapped down by his college and his community.

Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book. At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college. In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed “deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,” calling it “a philosophy that is godless, contrary to scripture and scientifically unverifiable.” Irate parents, pastors and others complained to Bowling, while a meeting between church leaders and Colling “led to some tension and misunderstanding,” Bowling said in a letter to trustees.

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…but there it is, hosting a major young-earth creationism advocacy site. How humiliating! David A. Plaisted is a computer science professor who has accumulated piles of raving nonsense to support his creationism, and I would think the university would find it a bit of an embarrassment to see one of their faculty flaunting their stupidity in such an awful way, especially now that the Chronicle has picked up on it, and a Duke grad student has rubbed their noses in it.

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I confess that I really don’t know much about this fellow, Steven D. Smith. He’s a lawyer, and he seems to be firmly in the Intelligent Design creationism camp, and that about exhausts my knowledge of the man.

As Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, says: “The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It’s not. We’ve heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side.”

I already don’t like him. He’s inaccurate — we don’t refer to IDists as fundamentalists, for the most part; we know they’re not, and we also know that many of the fundamentalists don’t like them very much — and he uses the term “Darwinist,” which throws up another big red flag.

So when Brian Leiter suggested I might find his critique of Smith amusing, I was game … but now I must also confess that I find most of the dissection of Smith’s legal philosophy and his argument that jurisprudence is heading for extinction a bit beyond me. At least, that is, until I hit this paragraph, and discovered what was amusing.

[U]nder modern conventions, academic discussion is supposed to be carried on in secular terms, meaning, for the most part, the terms of scientific naturalism and of common sense everyday experience.  In attempting to explain some happening or phenomenon, it is perfectly permissible for modern scholars to refer to religion—or to people’s beliefs in God.  By contrast, actual appeals to God, or to anything that looks metaphysically suspicious or exotic, are out of bounds.  As a result of this drastic narrowing of the range of admissible argument or explanation, claims or positions that would once have been framed forthrightly in theological terms now must be translated into more secular terms—or else abandoned.

Oh. So Steven D. Smith believes that a sign of the decline of the significance of jurisprudence is that lawyers can no longer invoke the authority of a deity in their arguments and be taken seriously. No wonder he’s on the side of Intelligent Design creationism! Since their only argument is a claim to the inside track on what’s going on inside the mind of their divine Designer, the fact that the law doesn’t treat testimony about what God told the witness or lawyer as the literal Ultimate Word really scuttles their case.

Maybe in the next Dover case the creationists can subpoena the burning bush to get around this narrowing of admissibility.