When pigs develop wings

You can slap some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

Just because you start calling Christianity 'Intelligent Design' doesn't make it a suitable reference for a science class.

If you read the judge's opinion in the celebrated Dover case (ok, the excerpt that appeared in the Times), all Christians have done is taken the textbooks that have been sitting in the basement since the Supreme Court ruled you can't teach creationism as science, and replaced the word 'creationism' with the phrase 'intelligent design'.

Don't let the weasel phrase ID fool you--just substitute the word Christianity whenever you hear it. None of these textbooks or Christians are saying let's tell kids in a biology class to check out how Muslims believe the world started, when you push kids toward ID textbooks you're pushing Christianity.

The judge's point is there is no such thing as a scientific theory called 'Intelligent Design'.

ID is Christianity... which is a religion. Its precepts depend on faith, not replicable laboratory experiments.

So you can't answer whether a religion is 'good science', as entirely separate fields the standards by which you would judge one doesn't apply to the other. It'd make as much sense to ask whether science is 'good religion.'

That's why you study one in a religion class, the other in a science class.

I actually have no problem if someone wants the Bible to inform their science class, to inform their economics class, to inform their math class. That's what Catholic schools do.

I obviously have a problem when it's my taxpayer dollars in a public school that's going to evangelize for Christianity.

Let's be clear: To require teachers to tell kids in a science classroom to check out a textbook on ID for an alternate to Darwin is to force public school teachers to evangelize for Christianity.

To suggest ID as an alternate to Darwin is like suggesting loaves and fishes as an alternative to Adam Smith in an economics class.

It's a silly game to say jeez, evolution used to be thought wrong, just like people are saying I.D. is wrong; so let's expose kids to both and see what turns out to be right. There are lots of theories that people think are wrong--we don't teach any of them in a science class.

The whole point of developing a school curriculum is not to say this is everything that anyone thinks about anything. From a logistics and standpoint, schools teach what the most expert current view of each subject matter is--if there is strong debate, then you teach what the most current views are.

There is no debate in this case. 99.9% of biologists think Darwin is the explanation for how life as we know it came to be. Sure, the .1% of biologists who believe Christianity explains life could be right--just like the .1% of scientists who believe horoscopes foretell the future could be right. If we open the door to Christianity in science classes, it would only be fair to teach horoscopes too.

The judge's point is Christianity's proper place in a public school is among its peers in a religion class, not shoulder to shoulder with Darwin in a science class.

Gary Larson's "Great moments in evolution" cartoon from Oxford's Astrophysics department website.