There’s been a lot of debate in the US this year about how evolution should be taught in schools and whether Intelligent Design should also be given visibility. A high profile court case has been underway for some time in Dover, Pennsylvania, in which a group of parents opposed to ID sued the school board to prevent them allowing a statement sympathetic to ID to be read to students. Their core argument is that ID is a religous position and under the US constitutional separation of church and state should have no place in a high school science curriculum.
The judgement in the case has just been announced today and is described in an article on philly.com. Judge John Jones has sided with the plaintiffs, and made a pretty scathing attack on ID as a religously motivated idea. Here are a couple of quotes:
Jones decried the “breathtaking inanity” of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion…
the judge said: “We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom.”
Let me say first of all that I don’t yet have a position on ID as a scientific proposition, and I think that it is unwise to advocate teaching ID in science classrooms when it has such little support in the scientific community. However, it is clear to me that ID does make claims that are properly within the bounds of scientific enquiry and do not depend for support on any religous viewpoint. For that reason, it is disappointing to me that the judge has completely mischaracterized the substance of ID.
There is a very comprehensive review of the judgement on the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views website.
The judgement itself (139 page pdf document) can be found here.