A huge Creation Museum is rising near Cincinnati - a $25 million project, four-fifth's of its funding collected from public contributions. It teaches that Earth is just 6,000 years old, that T. rex and his kind gamboled in Eden and that after the Flood children still played with baby dinosaurs, which had ridden Noah's ark to safety from the antediluvian world.
Against such drama, mere science is an unwelcome bother.
Aware of the precedent-setting potential of his ruling in the case of the Dover, Pa., schools, which had been compelled by their board of education to teach intelligent design as a legit alternative to evolution, Judge John E. Jones III constructed a detailed, closely argued 139-page ruling that demolishes ID's phony baloney.
The judge - for the record, although it shouldn't matter, a Republican appointed by President Bush, the born-again one -- exposes the supposed science of ID as a thin cover for slipping repackaged Creationism, long-since disallowed as unconstitutional, into public curricula.
As Jones noted, intelligent design advocates would have to change the rules of science in order to qualify their claims against biological science. (And indeed, the Kansas state school board recently did just that, in order to make room for supernatural explanations.)
The judge was helped to no end by the chief witness for ID, who testified that the plausibility of intelligent design depends upon the degree to which persons believe in God. Even its opponents couldn't have made the point any more clearly that ID is fundamentally religious.
Jones put it as plainly as possible in his ruling: "Intelligent design is not science."
The decision formally applies only within the district court's limited reach, but its impact will be nationwide, as a template for jurists deliberating similar cases from Georgia, Kansas and Florida, with still more sure to come.
We are wasting time, treasure and energy on a gambit that will, in the end, only repeat the crash-and-burn fate of Creationism and other schemes for insinuating religion where it has no business evangelizing.
American kids' understanding of science already lags that of students in just about every other developed nation, and small wonder. Nearly half of us believe God created humans along with Earth, presto, about 10,000 years ago. Science puts Earth's age at around 4.5 billion years.
Compound that fog of misinformation with a project that, even if it can't get its way in classrooms, means to intimidate public schools from teaching biology and geology straight-forwardly, and you have a formula for a once leading-edge nation to fall even farther behind.
We are letting ourselves be hustled and bullied out of our future, oddly in the name of God.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.
