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Edwards v. Aguillard (Creation Science and Evolution)


A question came up in my social studies class about prehistory. A student wanted to know how all the different species came into existence. We talked briefly about the Cambrian explosion, which prompted another student to ask about the origin of the universe. This led to a great discussion about cosmology that has since spawned other discussions about God, time, and origins. It just happened that I had been reading The Case for a Creator, by Lee Strobel, so answers to their questions were fresh in my mind. It also brought me back to a civil liberties class I took in college, in which we were required to simulate landmark Supreme Court cases. In one of these, we simulated Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), a case that struck down a Louisiana law—called the “Balanced Treatment for Creation Science and Evolution Science in Public School Instruction Act”—forbidding the teaching of evolution in the public school classroom unless it was accompanied by the teaching of creation. The central question revolved around whether the law established a religion. I argued fervently that the law did not establish a religion because it did not fail a test established by the Supreme Court called the Lemon test (from the case Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971), which states the following:

1. The law must have a secular purpose;
2. The law’s effect must not advance or inhibit religion
3. The law must not cause an “excessive government entanglement” of religion.

I found great help in this from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the case. Besides arguing that the Louisiana law did not fail the Lemon test, he also showed that secular humanism had previously been determined by the Supreme Court to be a religion (Torcaso v.Watkins, 1961), stating that by prohibiting the teaching of creation science (intelligent design) and promoting the teaching of evolution science, teachers were now in fact advancing a religion.

To this day, I believe strongly that both evolution and intelligent design should be taught together to offer students all the evidence so that they can come to their own conclusions. As Scalia pointed out, creationism and evolution are the only two viable explanations for man’s origins. It is only fair to provide students with evidence for both explanations.
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