Two House Republicans are citing landmark education reform legislation in pressing for the adoption of a school science curriculum in their home state of Ohio that includes teaching an alternative to evolution.
In what both sides of the debate say is the first attempt of its kind, Reps. John Boehner and Steve Chabot have urged the Ohio Board of Education to consider the language in a conference report that accompanied the major education law enacted earlier this year.
"Where topics are taught that may generate controversy [such as biological evolution], the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the Ohio board, quoting the conference report language. That language was crafted with the help of a leading proponent of "intelligent design theory," which contends that the very complexity of life is evidence that the world was organized by a guiding intelligence.
The growing movement behind that theory, which does not attribute the world's creation to God, is supported by conservative Christian groups, whose drive to include the teaching of Bible-based "creation science" in public schools was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1987.
While Ohio is now the main battleground, in recent years legislatures or school boards in such states as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Hawaii, New Mexico, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Kansas have also been wrestling with the issue.
The Ohio school board has been embroiled for months in a controversy over whether to include intelligent-design theory, along with evolutionary science, in a revised science curriculum scheduled to be approved later this year. Evolutionary science holds that all existing organisms developed from earlier life forms through natural selection.
Proponents of the intelligent-design theory have cited language in the federal law as the basis for including lessons on the theory wherever evolution is taught
However, the nation's leading science organizations generally view intelligent-design theory as a pseudoscientific way to teach creationism.
But intelligent-design theory apparently resonates with the public. In their letter to the Ohio board, Boehner, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Chabot cited a 2001 Zogby poll that found that 71 percent of those surveyed supported offering students the "scientific evidence against evolution."
Intelligent-design proponents -- such as Phillip Johnson, a University of California at Berkeley law professor whose 1991 book, "Darwin on Trial," lifted the fledgling intelligent-design movement from obscurity -- hope to bring the concept to other state curricula.
"If you are going to teach the Darwinist view that organisms may look like they were designed but weren't, then you have to allow for the possibility that they look like they were designed because they were designed," said Johnson, who helped draft the language that was eventually distilled into the conference report.
Johnson's writings make clear, however, that his aims extend into the realm of religion. "When people are taught for years on end that good thinking is naturalistic thinking, and that bringing God into the picture only leads to confusion and error, they have to be pretty dense not to get the point that God must be an illusion," he wrote in another book, "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds."
The language Johnson helped craft was originally introduced as a nonbinding resolution by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. The resolution passed the Senate last June in a 91 to 8 vote. Eight Republicans, who considered the measure an unwarranted intrusion into local curriculum matters, voted against it.
