Plead the First

Wednesday, the newly-elected Dover Area school board nixed their predecessors’ Intelligent Design policy:

On a voice vote, and with no discussion beforehand, the newly elected Dover Area School Board unanimously rescinded the policy. Two weeks earlier, a judge ruled the policy unconstitutional.

“This is it,” new school board president Bernadette Reinking said Tuesday, indicating the vote was final and the case was closed.

Unfortunately, that won’t be the end of it for the rest of the country. One of the next possible fronts in the battle may be Ohio:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which helped bring the Dover lawsuit, has obtained boxes of records from the Ohio Department of Education pertaining to the state school board’s adoption of a controversial science lesson plan nearly two years ago, as reported in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

That action is a prelude to a possible challenge of the lesson, “Critical Analysis of Evolution,” which critics contend is warmed-over intelligent design.

The phrase “warmed-over intelligent design” is an interesting one, and it’s an idea that was echoed by Ken Miller in a talk he gave on January 3rd at Case Western Reserve University. To paraphrase, since I can’t find a transcript, he pointed out that Ohio’s science standards don’t specifically mention Intelligent Design or Creationism. Instead, they aim to “teach the controversy” by pointing out the gaps and criticisms of evolutionary theory, and by drawing attention to the fact that not everyone agrees with the idea of evolution. By avoiding any requirements to teach ID, the authors of the standards apparently hope to undermine the teaching of evolution while dodging legal challenges such as the one that derailed the Dover ID effort.

It’s both encouraging and sad at the same time. Encouraging in that ID proponents have had to continually water down and whittle away at the meat of their philosophy in order to try to slip it into schools. What started out as “biblically-literal, 6000-year-old-earth, man-and-dinosaur-roaming-the-earth-together Creationism” morphed into Intelligent Design (“There’s absolutely a Creator, but no, of course it’s not necessarily God – what gave you that idea?”), and is now turning into “Teach the Controversy”.

The sad part is that ID proponents, who obviously believe in God and the Bible, are willing to resort to so much subterfuge to get their ideas taught in the classroom.

Update: The Panda’s Thumb has links to the Ken Miller talk that I mentioned above – Real Player or Windows Media Player.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Politics, Religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.