Jonathan Witt

My old college town paper, the Lawrence Journal-World, reports that two new classes at the University of Kansas will work to discredit the theory of intelligent design. One class, taught by religion professor Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s religious studies department, was initially titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies. In an e-mail to an atheist listserv, Mirecki wrote: “The fundies [fundamentalists] want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category mythology.”

Charles Krauthammer’s syndicated essay against intelligent design ran opposite mine in today’s Seattle Times. The piece is full of problems, which Tom Gilson and Lawrence Seldon explore in loving detail here and here.

Now I would have framed a couple of points in their otherwise fine analysis a little differently. In one place,

In this column in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum writes:

George Neumayr of the American Spectator has a good column about the Dover trial:

The ACLU has gone from defending teachers to prosecuting them. In a federal courtroom this week, the ACLU argued that science teachers in the school district of Dover, Pennyslvania, are not free under the Constitution to question evolutionary theory.

He discusses various journalists’ reactions to it: