"Teach the Controversy!" Facepalm*

[Asmodee]

A court of law should not settle science

This is hilarious that the people who for years before the trial bragged about putting Darwin on trial or putting evolution on trial get the chance and they failed spectacularly. Not to mention these are fools who rally on populism
and even had to make there own phony journal(which almost never publishes anything) because they could not handle real review. Not to mention they were all hot and bothered when it looked like they will win(because the judge was a conservative) guess it only doesn't count unless they win it's sad really

On the surface that courts shouldn't settle science makes a lot of sense.  Under the surface, though, this is a whole convoluted can of worms.  It's one of those misleading statements Christians often make in their arguments which sounds good, but isn't actually what they're saying at all.  Courts should not, could not and DID NOT settle science at any point.  Scientists settle science, and questions about evolution and intelligent design were settled by scientists long before the Dover trial.  What the court in the Dover trial did was settle an establishment clause case, which is very much what they should be doing.

What they're really saying here is actually not that they don't want courts to settle science.  What they're saying is that they don't want scientists to settle science.  They don't want science "settled" at all.  They want to be able to teach it in schools as if it has some scientific merit regardless what the scientific community thinks of it.  In their minds creationism is every bit as valid a "theory" as evolution, or any other science, for that matter.  It doesn't matter to them that there is no evidence for it.  They will happily make it up, as I'm sure everyone here has seen time and time again from people with beliefs in various woos.

It has been my experience that those who believe in some form of woo just LOVE the idea of taking their particular woo to court.  They firmly believe that there is enough evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to win a court case every time they bring it up.  I was in a lively discussion a few months ago with a theist who constantly brought up the court analogy.  He was firmly convinced that there was enough evidence for the validity of this and that in the Bible that, if taken to court, it could be proved to be true in its entirety, including the magic bits, for which there is no evidence.  This comes from a black or white, true or false, right or wrong mentality where something is either right in its entirety or wrong in its entirety.  If the scientific community doesn't believe a city mentioned in the Bible existed, but then archaeologists find it then science is "wrong" and the Bible is "right".  In their minds that proves Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by magic.  And it doesn't even have to be a real scientific discovery.  If they just hear that the cities were discovered by archaeologists, that's enough to make it true because they want very badly to believe it's true.  You could make up some fantastical claim about scientists finding evidence that fairies existed and if you ended your story with, "which proves the Bible is true because that's exactly what it said they would find" many of them would start repeating that utter bullshit as absolute fact, and they would believe that there was enough evidence to support it to prove it "in a court of law".

Of course, when science is involved the "court of law" thing is just a way of lowering the standards.  There isn't enough evidence to convince well educated scientists whose job it is to study this, but there might be enough evidence to convince 12 schmoes with 8 high school diplomas and a welding course completion certificate between them that it's true.