Recent legal action has spurred debate over the legitimacy of intelligent design and its place in high school classrooms.
In Dover, Pa., eight families are suing the Dover Area School District for allegedly violating the separation of church and state by requiring that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution.
In Ohio, state science curriculum requires that high school teachers exclusively teach the theory of evolution.
That's what the state standards are
and that's what we teach said Tom Stork, head of the Athens High School Science Department. Stork was also a member of the State Department of Education Advisory Committee and Subcommittee on Evolution and helped develop the Science Academic Content Standards.
The theory of intelligent design holds that the universe and living things were created by an intelligent agent.
All it is is creationism repackaged. That's all it is in my estimation said Eric Miller, an Athens High School chemistry and physical science teacher.
Proponents of including intelligent design in the curriculum deny there is any relationship to creationism, advocating that there is evidence of design in nature.
Those against intelligent design find its implications to be similar to, or the same as, creationism.
The main way in which they say there is a difference is that they don't specify that the creation of living things came from the act of 'God
' but instead it came from some general sort of intervention
Stork said.
The curriculum in Ohio schools must meet the Science Academic Content Standards, which were created by a joint council of the State Board of Education and the Ohio Board of Regents and adopted in 2002 by the State Board of Education.
The standards give benchmarks -- specific statements of what students should know and be able to do - by grade-level clusters. Unfortunately
they left a little window of opportunity for creationists who are acting as science teachers to slip [intelligent design] into the curriculum if they so choose
Miller said. One of these windows used by intelligent design advocates is a benchmark that requires life science teachers to describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory. However, it specifically states that, the intent of this benchmark does not mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design.
[Intelligent design] may be an interesting thing to explore in an English class
or a philosophy class or a social studies class
but it doesn't belong as part of the science curriculum because it doesn't have anything to do with science
Stork said.
Ohio University science professors said teaching intelligent design in science classes would be inappropriate because intelligent design has no empirical support.
Intelligent design has absolutely no data to support it. It's proof by assertion
and its hypotheses are not testable - that's the most important thing
