Intelligent decision

FEDERAL JUDGE John E. Jones III restored faith both in rational thinking and in the independent judiciary yesterday when he struck down a Pennsylvania school board's requirement that intelligent design be taught in public school science classes as ''breathtaking inanity." We hope the decision will stop the damaging movement to present creationism as an equal ''alternative" to Darwin's magisterial theory of evolution and help restore science to its proper place in the national canon.

Jones, a lifetime Republican who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bush in 2002, neatly cut through the fog of ambiguity conjured by proponents to declare that intelligent design is not science and ''cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents." In a detailed 139-page ruling, he concluded that requiring intelligent design to be taught in public schools is an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause forbidding the state from promoting religion.

In 2004, the Dover, Pa., school board passed a resolution that ''students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory" and offered students the intelligent design treatise ''Of Pandas and People" as a supplemental reference book for further examination. Intelligent design argues that life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent being, presumably God.

Unlike gravity, for example, intelligent design is a hypothesis that cannot be tested through the scientific method in experiments with replicable results. It is not a scientific theory, and Judge Jones robustly disputed the school board's efforts to present it as a secular alternative as ''insincere" and ''a sham."

In some ways the people of Dover were already ahead of the court. In November's elections they ousted the eight members of the school board who had brought an unwelcome notoriety to their community by requiring intelligent design in the curriculum. But other parts of the country have not been so enlightened. On the same November day, the Kansas Board of Education officially altered the definition of science so that it no longer makes reference to ''natural explanations" -- leaving open the possibility of supernatural explanations. For a country that is desperately trying to compete internationally in science, medicine, and technology, casting doubt on the very meaning of science is unhelpful in the extreme.

The resurgence of interest in religion in America is a laudable development and will enrich many lives. But it should not be thrust into public school science classes. Both science and religion will be better served by Judge Jones's bracing demarcation of the bright line between the two.