Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), was a United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of teaching creationism. The Court considered a Louisiana law requiring that where evolutionary science was taught in public schools, creation science must also be taught. The Court ruled that this law violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion. It also held that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."
Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968), was a United States Supreme Court case that invalidated an Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in the public schools. The Court held that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits a state from requiring, in the words of the majority opinion, "that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma." The Supreme Court declared the Arkansas statute unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. After this decision, some jurisdictions passed laws that required the teaching of creation science alongside evolution when evolution was taught. These were also ruled unconstitutional by the Court in the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard.
Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (2004), was a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The lawsuit, originally filed as Newdow v. United States Congress, Elk Grove Unified School District, et al. in 2000, led to a 2002 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance are an endorsement of religion and therefore violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. After an initial decision striking the congressionally added "one nation under God" language, the superseding opinion on denial of rehearing en banc was more limited, holding that compelled recitation of the language by school teachers to students was invalid.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court that defined First Amendment rights of students in U.S. public schools. The Tinker test, also known as the "substantial disruption" test, is still used by courts today to determine whether a school's interest to prevent disruption infringes upon students' First Amendment rights.
The creation–evolution controversy involves an ongoing, recurring cultural, political, and theological dispute about the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. Creationism was once widely believed to be true, but since the mid-19th century evolution by natural selection has been established as an empirical scientific fact.
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The textbook endorses the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design—namely that life shows evidence of being designed by an intelligent agent which is not named specifically in the book, although proponents understand that it refers to the Christian God. They present various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution.
Dean H. Kenyon is Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University, a young Earth creationist, and one of the instigators of the intelligent design movement. He is the author of Biochemical Predestination.
Daniel v. Waters, 515 F.2d 485 was a 1975 legal case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down Tennessee's law regarding the teaching of "equal time" of evolution and creationism in public school science classes because it violated the Establishment clause of the US Constitution.
Selman v. Cobb County School District, 449 F.3d 1320, was a United States court case in Cobb County, Georgia involving a sticker placed in public school biology textbooks. The sticker was a disclaimer stating that "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, concerning the origin of living things." The plaintiffs were parents of children in Cobb County schools who claimed the sticker violated both the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution and the separation of church and state clause in the Georgia State Constitution because its purpose and effect was to cast doubt on the scientific consensus regarding evolutionary theory in order to promote religious beliefs in the schools.
Willoughby v. Stever, 504 F.2d 271 was a 1973 American legal decision in a case brought by evangelist William Willoughby against the National Science Foundation director H. Guyford Stever and the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado for using taxpayer money to fund textbooks developed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) because they included evolution instruction. Willoughby claimed the pro-evolution curriculum was by extension also promoting secular humanism as the "official religion of the United States," and thus violated the Establishment clause of the US Constitution. Willoughby accused scientists of "intellectual snobbery", and opposed tax revenues going to support education offensive to his religious views. He argued that creationist education should be given the same tax payer funding as evolution education.
Capistrano Valley High School is a public high school at the southern border of Mission Viejo, California, USA, that is run by the Capistrano Unified School District. It is set on a hilltop overlooking the San Diego Freeway (I-5) corridor and Saddleback Mountain. It is located on Via Escolar, off the Avery exit of the I-5. The school attendance boundaries primarily serve students from eastern, southern and northern Mission Viejo and a small northern portion of San Juan Capistrano.
Wright v. Houston Independent School District, 486 F.2d 137 was an American legal case brought by a parent of a student in the Houston Independent School District in Houston, Texas suing on behalf of her daughter and fellow students to prevent the district from teaching evolution as fact and without reference to alternative theories. The plaintiffs claimed evolutionary theory endorsed a secularist religious view, and argued the school's failure to incorporate the teaching of a particular religious alternative to evolutionary theory as derived from the Bible's creation account held that religious view up to ridicule and contempt. To allow evolution while avoiding creationism was unconstitutional, the suit claimed, because it advanced one particular sectarian view over another. The plaintiffs maintained that the school's evolutionary teaching constituted "the establishment of a sectarian, atheistic religion" and was an interference of their own rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the Establishment clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The case is one of a series of legal battles over the teaching of evolution in American public schools, and the first to be initiated by opponents of such teaching.
Freiler v. Tangipahoa Parish Board of Education, 185 F.3d 337 was United States federal court case on the constitutionality of a policy requiring teachers to read aloud a disclaimer whenever they taught about evolution.
Webster v. New Lenox School District, 917 F.2d 1004 was a court case in Illinois, in which a social studies teacher Ray Webster sued the New Lenox School District 122 in New Lenox, Illinois, which he accused of violating his First Amendment right to free speech for stopping him from teaching "creation science" in class. The court found however that the school district had a right to restrict Webster to teaching the specified curriculum, and that in any case the teaching of "creation science" was illegal, having been ruled to violate the establishment clause in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
The level of support for evolution among scientists, the public and other groups is a topic that frequently arises in the creation-evolution controversy and touches on educational, religious, philosophical, scientific and political issues. The subject is especially contentious in countries where significant levels of non-acceptance of evolution by general society exist although evolution is taught at school and university.
This timeline of intelligent design outlines the major events in the development of intelligent design as presented and promoted by the intelligent design movement.
LeVake v. Independent School District 656 was a 2000 court case heard in a Minnesota State District Court and appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. The case was brought by high school biology teacher Rodney LeVake who had been told by the Faribault Public Schools that he could not teach the "evidence both for and against the theory" of evolution. After learning that he wanted to teach "criticisms of evolution" to his pupils, school officials reassigned him to teach a different class.
The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) is a conservative legal defense organization in California, United States.
In American schools, the Genesis creation narrative was generally taught as the origin of the universe and of life until Darwin's scientific theories became widely accepted. While there was some immediate backlash, organized opposition did not get underway until the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy broke out following World War I; several states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution while others debated them but did not pass them. The Scopes Trial was the result of a challenge to the law in Tennessee. Scopes lost his case, and further states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution.
Board of Trustees of Scarsdale v. McCreary, 471 U.S. 83 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case in which an evenly split Court upheld per curiam a lower court's decision that the display of a privately sponsored nativity scene on public property does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
