By Lucy Sherriff for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
In Dover, Pennsylvania, 11 parents are challenging in court the
local school board's decision to allow intelligent design to be
taught in science classes.
Intelligent design holds that some living things are too complex
to have arisen through natural selection, as suggested by the
Darwinian theory of evolution. It states that there must be some
intelligent agent involved in their creation.
The parents argue that intelligent design is a thinly veiled
cover for creationism, and is covered by the constitutional ban on
the teaching of religion in public (state, for those in the UK)
schools.
In closing, the parents' lawyer Eric Rothschild said that the
policy had been introduced by members of the school board with a
religious agenda.
He also accused witnesses for the defence of lying in their
testimony that religion was not a motivating factor in introducing
intelligent design to the school. He also said that they lied when
they told the Judge they didn't know a text book expounding the
principles of intelligent design had been bought for the school
with money raised in a church.
One witness, former school board member William Buckingham, had
testified that he hadn't meant to advocate creationism in a
television interview, describing himself as a deer in the
headlights.
Rothschild argued that Buckingham knew exactly what he was doing
during the interview, saying: "That deer was wearing shades and was
totally at ease", Reuters reports.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the defence argued that intelligent
design is a "legitimate educational objective", and described it as
"the next great paradigm shift in science".
Attorney Patrick Gillen said that while the individual members
of the school board were religious, they were not trying to push a
religious agenda.
Judge John Jones says he wants to have made his ruling by the
end of the year, early January 2006 at the latest.
Meanwhile on Thursday, the Vatican issued a statement warning
against ignoring scientific reason, saying that by doing so,
religion risks turning into fundamentalism. Cardinal Paul Poupard,
who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture said:
"The permanent lesson that the Galileo case
represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various
disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural
sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating
themselves in the future."
He also argued that religion could act as the conscience of
science, citing the atomic bomb and the possibility of human clones
as scientific ideas devoid of ethics.
© The Register
2005
