Discussion Evolves

Getting "Creationism" into schools failed. "Intelligent Design" had its day in court, and has lost. Now it's time to "Teach the Controversy."

In 2005, Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III handed down a stunning decision that, at the time, most thought would take down the intelligent design movement. But American creationism doesn't die. It just adapts.

It's amazing to me that the Creationist movement has evolved and adapted, but their thinking has not.

A while ago, when the courts deemed creation science -- proto intelligent design -- a religious view and not constitutionally teachable as science in public schools, it adapted by cutting God off its letterhead and calling itself "intelligent design." The argument for I.D., and for "scientific creation theory" before it, is that evolution isn't up to the task of accounting for life. Given biology's complexity, and natural selection's inability to explain it, I.D. thinking goes, life must be designed by a, well, designer. I.D.ers skirted any mention of God, hoping to avoid getting snagged on the First Amendment's prohibition against promoting religion by arguing that I.D. was just a young and outlying science.

In the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that if you want to teach intelligent design in science class, first you have to show that it is a distinct species from its earlier, creationist form, not just a modified type. You've got to show us the science part.

Besides, Jones declared, your intelligent designer is obviously God.

The six-week trial -- the focus of a Nova documentary, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," aired Nov. 13 -- addressed a host of heady questions. What is science and how does it work? Can evolution account for the diversity of life we see on earth? What is religion? Can science say anything about the existence of a creator and still be science? It also examined the motivations of a local school board that tried to smuggle creationism into its high school biology curriculum. The judge's decision -- that I.D. was not science and that the school board was trying to promote its members' own religious views -- was followed by a short period of shock from the I.D. community. But now they're reorganizing and is now attacking Evolution through the expanded coverage of the controversy.

"Evolution remains under attack," says Eugenie Scott, an anthropologist and a director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching evolution in public schools. "If creationists have their way, teachers will eventually just stop teaching evolution. It'll just be too much trouble. And generations of students will continue to grow up ignorant of basic scientific realities."

(Here's all of it)