Some parents took a Pennsylvania school board to court when that board advocated the promotion of Intelligent Design theory as an alternative to the “flawed” theory of evolution in highschool science classes. The judge has ruled against the board. Good, that’s fine. It’s also kind of moot since the the wider community of parents voted those board members out a while ago anyway. Problem is: the judge based his decision on the criteria that intelligent design is just Christian creationism doctrine rebranded, and therefore espouses a particular religion, which is not permissible in science classrooms. Wrong wrong wrong. Intelligent design shouldn’t be allowed in science classrooms because it’s not science, not because it’s a particular religion.

This means that, in the wake of this and other similar rulings in the last couple of decades, we still don’t have a decent legal criteria in the US system to decide between what is and what isn’t science. I’m the first to admit that defining science is a sticky tricky business, but there are working definitions that would at least satisfy for gatekeeping highschool science classrooms. In the meantime, were intelligent design to gain supporters amongst non-christian religions (as my masters of philosophy roommate maddeningly claims it has), it could gain legitimacy as a “religiously nuetral” claim, and have another day in court with uncertain outcome. If we can’t decide what science is, then school boards could plausibly slip anything past that isn’t clearly marked as religious.

Eventually the US courts, and if we get unlucky, the Canadian courts, are just going to have to come out and say it: for the good of society, only science should be taught in science classrooms. And that decision will require an appendix defining science. Oh boy.

Maybe the point I’m missing here is that the US Constitution and US case law doesn’t care what you teach in science classrooms. The only pre-existing cocern is that religion not be advocated in the secular school system generally. If that’s the case, then there might be a danger: Americans are getting very soft on supporting their traditional constitutional seperation of church and state. If the question keeping religion out of science classrooms is not “what is science” but “what is religion”, a voter-led gutting of provisos against church in the state could lead to religion in any classroom, including the science lab.