Thursday, December 08, 2005
Conventional Wisdom: Dover Edition
Lisa Anderson of the Chicago Tribune writes that legal observers suggest there are three options for Judge John Jones III who is expected to rule in the Dover intelligent design case sometime around the first of the year:
... Jones could rule broadly. He could decide intelligent design, or ID, is religious belief, not scientific theory, and thus cannot be taught in public schools because it violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which mandates the separation of church and state. Or, he could rule the reverse, supporting ID's validity as science and thus opening the door to affirming the constitutionality of teaching ID.
The third option, they said, could be a narrow ruling limited to whether members of a local school board in Dover, Pa., had a primarily religious, rather than secular, purpose in adopting a policy introducing ID into the biology curriculum.
