With Dover over, I have begin to feel somewhat relieved that the American legal system recognizes that the science class is where science can be taught, and that attempts to inject non-science or religious philosophy requirements into the class are illegal. There is a new case, is my current home state of California, which worries me, though. “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is suing a rural school over its offering of a philosophy class in which intelligent design and evolution are to be taught as opposing views”:http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/13594642.htm.
This is the same group that successfully helped to bring the Dover suit, so I am saddened to see them perhaps going too far.
First of all, as a scientists I see no problem with philosophies, like intelligent design or social Darwinism, being juxtaposed in a philosophy class. Philosophies are often not dependent on facts or experiments, and are in many ways akin to religious viewpoints of the universe. They are not science. I therefore have no qualm with seeing ideas, like intelligent design, fall into their proper place.
I guess the problem with this particular philosophy class is that it intended, at least in large part, on teaching “evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological, and Biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin’s philosophy is not rock solid.” Of course, there are no scientific or biological reasons to doubt the theory of evolution (the class description, as mailed to parents, clearly fails to understand what it means to be a scientific theory). There are literal Bibilical reasons, but I’ll leave that to theologians and philosophers. Anyway, the problem is one of multiplicity: if the teacher had included polytheism, or multicultural origin myths (like the Chinese “azure egg”, the many Native American creation stories, and Biblical genesis), then they could at least have avoided the charge of “promoting a religion” in the public school system. I therefore agree with a large argument of the lawsuit: this is a pretty patent attempt to employ a single religion as a means of teaching in the public school.
More troublesome to me is that the structure – the design, if you will – of this class is horribly flawed and obviously unfair in a bunch of other ways. Rather than discussing Biblical genesis, Hindu creationism, and Darwinian philosophy in equal parts, the class material provided no support for evolution and involved speakers and videos all geared to ” . . . advocate religious perspectives and present religious theories as scientific ones.” That’s certainly not a proper philosophy course.
I’d say at the very least this school is guilty of very bad class design and misleading students to confuse a philosophical disagreement with scientific data and theories. At worst, they’re guilty of pushing the Bible in the public school, robbing their students of an education untainted by religious views.
