The “religious right,” have been persistent as moral entrepreneurs to push creationism/intelligent design in to public science curriculum for some time now. As we know from Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court established the three prong test to determine if legislation has violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The three prongs are, legislation must: have a secular purpose; must neither inhibit, nor advance religion; and must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.
In Edward v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law which mandated the teach of creationism with the theory of evolution was indeed in violation of the Establishment Clause. Since then, the religious right faction of our country have started a social movement centered around the concept of intelligent design. The major player in the movement is a conservative think tank called The Discovery Center, which is marking intelligent design as a scientific theory. The “Theory of Intelligent Design” is in fact based on a concept which they call “irreducibly complex,” meaning that, taken what we know about the Universe to the point where we have not yet explained a phenomenon or observation scientifically, and calling it “irreducibly complex.” This is a fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam which means it is an argument from ignorance, which is based on the idea that if something cannot be proven false, it must be true. Furthermore the “theory” of intelligent design is not a theory at all, at least not in the scientific sense, since there is no way to test its validity.
Even still despite the fact that the scientific community almost unanimously rejects the idea of intelligent design as anything that is even closely related to science, there is an active social movement to affect public policy around this issue. These are the reasons the framers of the Constitution saw fit to separate church and state. These are the reasons that Alexander Hamilton warned us of the dangerous nature of factions.
