Re: School District drops Intelligent Design Class

[Ed Brayton]

Brad M Pardee wrote: So much for the oft-repeated myth that opponents of intelligent design simply want to keep ID out of the science classrooms.  When I read this article, it seemed pretty clear that groups like Americans United aren't going to be content with that.  They seem to want to make sure that any student in a public school makes it safely to graduation without ever having heard about ID in any forum of any kind at school (unless, of course, it's a forum where they can say, "See, anybody with any scientific understanding knows that ID isn't true.")  If I had kids, this is the sort of poppycock that would have cynics like me following Rick Duncan's example and homeschooling them. I think you're misrepresenting the position of those who oppose teaching creationism. No one on our side, so far as I know, has ever said that it's okay to advocate creationism as long as it's not done in a science class. We have said, and I do believe, that it is possible to teach *about* creationism in an objective way in, for example, a comparative religion class, so long as it is done without endorsing or advocating it, just as I think it's possible to teach a course on the Bible as history or literature without endorsing or advocating for it. But the class in El Tejon was clearly not a course that did that. Even the Discovery Institute, after first making the claim that you did above, changed their tune quickly when they saw the actual course content and realized that this course, in their words, "advocates young earth and Biblical creationism." Since the courts have consistently ruled that creationism is an inherently religious idea and schools may not advocate it without running afoul of the establishment clause, surely it's not reasonable to allow a loophole that says you may do so as long as you change the label on the course from "science" to "philosophy". That's all they did in this case was change the label, the content was almost entirely about creationist claims about science - the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the fossil record, radiometric dating and so forth. Ed Brayton

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