Attacking ID with the wrong stick?

A redated post.

In an oped piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Alexander George says that the enterprise of demarcating science from pseudoscience is a historically a failure. So while he opposed ID and the attempt to bring it into the school classrooms, he is critical of the attempt to use a distinction between science and pseudoscience to argue against its inclusion.

My own study in the philosophy of science reached much the same conclusion where Creationism was concerned. After Judge Overton used a demarcationist argument to strike down the Arkansas creationism law, both Philip Quinn and Larry Laudan, neither of them defenders of creationism by any stretch of the imagination, argued that the judge had accepted bad arguments from expert witnesses in support of their conclusions.

Larry Laudan, "Commentary: Science at the Bar - Causes for Concern,"
_Science, Technology and Human Values_ v7 n41 (Fall 1982) 16-19.

Philip L. Quinn, "The Philosopher of Science as Expert Witness," in C. F.
Delaney, J. T. Cushing, G. Gutting, eds., _Science and Reality_ (University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984) 32-53

and more generally:

Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem," repr. in M. Ruse,
ed., _But Is It Science?_ (Prometheus Books, 1988) 337-350

I was even told that when Judge Overton ruled there were Big Bang cosmologists who pleaded with the judge not to use the criteria he did to define science because it would not only rule out creationism, but modern cosmology as well.