Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy Volume 17 Article 2 Issue 2 Symposium on Religion in the Public Square 1-1-2012 Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design Kent Greenwalt Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndjlepp Recommended Citation Kent Greenwalt, Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design, 17 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol'y 321 (2003). Available at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndjlepp/vol17/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLES ESTABLISHING RELIGIOUS IDEAS: EVOLUTION, CREATIONISM, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN KENT GREENAWALT* I. INTRODUCTION The enduring conflict between evolutionary theorists and creationists has focused on America's public schools. If these schools had no need to teach about the origins of life, each side might content itself with promoting its favored worldview and declaring its opponents narrow-minded and dogmatic. But edu- cators have to decide what to teach, and because the Supreme Court has declared that public schools may not teach religious propositions as true, the First Amendment is crucially implicated. On close examination, many of the controversial constitu- tional issues turn out to be relatively straightforward, but others, posed mainly by the way schools teach evolution and by what they say about "intelligent design" theory, push us to deep questions about the nature of science courses and what counts as teaching religious propositions.