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`Intelligent designers' lose US federal court decision

In one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and evolution in 80 years, a federal judge on Tuesday barred a state public school district from teaching "intelligent design" in biology class, saying the concept violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

US District Judge John Jones delivered a stinging attack on the Dover Area School Board, the first in the nation to insert intelligent design into its science curriculum in October last year.

The ruling was a major setback to the intelligent design movement, which is also waging battles in Georgia and Kansas. Intelligent design holds that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.

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.

A six-week trial over the issue yielded "overwhelming evidence" establishing that intelligent design "is a religious viewpoint, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," said Jones, a Republican and a churchgoer appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

The school system said it will probably not appeal the ruling, because the members who backed intelligent design were ousted in November's elections and replaced with a new slate opposed to the policy.

During the trial, the board argued that it was trying improve science education by exposing students to alternatives to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection.

The policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade lessons on evolution. The statement said Darwin's theory is "not a fact" and has inexplicable "gaps." It referred students to an intelligent-design textbook, Of Pandas and People.

But 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."

In 1987, the US Supreme Court ruled that states cannot require public schools to balance evolution lessons by teaching creationism.

Eric Rothschild, an attorney for the families who challenged the policy, called the ruling "a real vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district."

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which represented the school district and describes its mission as defending the religious freedom of Christians, said: "What this really looks like is an ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God."

It was the latest chapter in a debate over the teaching of evolution dating back to the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, in which Tennessee biology teacher John Scopes was fined US$100 for violating a state law against teaching evolution.

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Solving the question of life's origin

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