In the present legal climate there is no shock that Intelligent Design [ID] was ruled out of the science classroom. It is now illegal in yet another district to argue that the facts of Biology point to intelligent design.

The intellectual chattering class in the US is overwhelmingly secular. This is not because secularism is "more intelligent" but due to the huge and increasingly secular government education system and a publicly funded university structure that favors secularism as well. You get more of the ideas you fund.

Contributor John Mark Reynolds John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, at Biola University. His personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.

In fact, the intellectual force of theism or design related theories is best seen in the fact that a large minority of intellectuals reject it in the US at great professional cost. One thinks, for example, of Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame whose ideas about science (as one of the nation's leading theorists regarding knowledge) your child cannot read if he lives in Dover.

The judge (like previous judges in creation trials) has adopted a naive philosophy of science based on a misunderstanding of the data. For example, the judge claims that the philosophy of ID folk would allow astrology being considered as a potential science. This is, of course, true, but not shocking. ID does not require that astrology be found true or useful as a description of reality. It would allow the claims of astrology to be measured and found wanting. In fact, scientists now frequently claim to have shown that astrology is bad science (which I think is true). Science can now claim that personal causes are not in effect, but one is not allowed to argue that they are. It is as simple as that. Secularism will be treated as untouchable in your child's public school science class.

Critics of ID like to say that it is "religion" disguised as science. It is, of course, compatible with religion and most people who support it are religious. However, it is also compatible with non-religious ideas (like those of Aristotle). Once again a court has decided that religious motivations of supporters are enough to ban an idea (that is not essentially religious) from taxpayer funded schools.

Even worse is the notion that a religious idea is so dangerous to the health of sensitive secularists that it cannot even be discussed in a neutral manner in science class. Send your kids to private schools or home school them for now so that they can follow the argument wherever it leads. Otherwise, your kids will not be allowed to ask certain questions. Don't, of course, send your kids to a school that will not seriously consider atheism. On the other hand, don't send your kids to a public school that must cut off discussion if it seems to suggest (horrors) that religion might be true or that there is a personal cause that accounts for the cosmos. Find a school that will allow freedom of thought. Right now that will not be a Dover public school. -one-