Findings on Hostility at Smithsonian Noted in NRO Article

[Rick Duncan]

Edwards did not hold that "creation science" could not be taught in the govt schools. Nor did it hold that "creation science" was religion and not science. It held only that the particular law (the "Balanced Treatment Act") was invalid because it did not have a secular purpose. Even here, the Ct accomplished this only by misinterpreting the stated secular purpose--academic freedom for students--and saying that since the law did not advance academic freedom for teachers it was a sham. Scalia's dissent demolished the majority's reasoning on this point.
 
Rick Duncan

Ed Brayton <stcynic at crystalauto.com> wrote:
As a further note on the connection between this and EC jurisprudence, 
there is a major lawsuit going on right now in Pennsylvania over this 
and the central question will be whether ID is a scientific theory or 
merely old-fashioned creationism dressed up in vaguely 
scientific-sounding language. If it is the latter, then the Edwards 
precedent applies. And so far, the evidence is strongly on the side of 
the first conclusion, not the second. The criticisms of evolution 
offered by the ID crowd - and that is all ID actually is at this point, 
a set of criticisms of evolutionary theory, there is no ID theory or 
model - are the same criticisms that were found in creation science that 
was ruled out of public school science classrooms in 1987. In fact, I 
have just today been reading the deposition of the publisher of the 
textbook, Of Pandas and People, that the Dover school board put into 
science classrooms there. His name is Jon Buell. In that deposition he 
makes the very damaging admission that they used the exact same 
definition in the book of "creation science" as they used for 
"intelligent design". In fact, the original draft of the book used the 
terms "creation", "creationism" and "creation science" and they were 
later simply replaced with the phrase "intelligent design" with no 
change in the definition or the positions attributed to them as distinct 
ideas at all. And this is from the first (and only) "intelligent design" 
textbook ever produced, the very book that coined the phrase. This is 
likely to be very compelling in court.

Ed Brayton




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Rick Duncan 
Welpton Professor of Law 
University of Nebraska College of Law 
Lincoln, NE 68583-0902

"When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone." C.S.Lewis, Grand Miracle

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered."  --The Prisoner
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