Intelligent design appears to be destined for expulsion from the public schools of Dover, Pennsylvania. Last Tuesday, November 8, 2005, the good people of Dover voted out of office all eight members of the Dover School Board who were up for reelection. These ousted school board members appear to have incensed Dover’s electorate by voting in 2004 to require ninth-grade biology teachers to include in their lessons on evolution a one-minute statement on intelligent design.

The Dover School Board’s inclusion of the simple 159 word statement on intelligent design in the public school’s science curriculum quickly prompted a lawsuit from a group of disgruntled parents and teachers. The suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court with the help of the ACLU, alleges that the school board violated the so-called constitutional separation of church and state by imposing religion on students. The recently concluded trial drew national attention and was dubbed by the press as “Scopes II,” after Dayton, Tennessee’s famous Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. The presiding judge over “Scopes II,” John E. Jones III, has promised to issue his verdict in the case no later than January.

All eight of Dover’s incumbent school board members were defeated in their bid for reelection by “pro-evolution” candidates who campaigned against the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. One of the winning “pro-evolution” candidates, Bernadette Reinking, explained her election and the defeat of all the incumbents as a mere matter of voters being “tired of intelligent design.” Another winning candidate, Rob McIlvaine, insisted that intelligent design “is not science”; therefore, the people of Dover don’t want it taught in their schools.

The Apostle Paul said that anyone who looked at creation and then denied the existence of the Creator was without excuse (Romans 1:19-20). I guess this means that the shades will be kept pulled in the public schools of Dover. I mean they don’t want their kids looking out classroom windows at creation. If they did, they might come to the crazy, unscientific conclusion that there really is a Creator. And we all know that it’s unconstitutional for pupils in public schools to think such thoughts; in fact, it may be unconstitutional for pupils in today’s public schools to think at all.

Televangelist Pat Robertson has recommended to the residents of Dover that they “call on Charles Darwin” for help the next time a natural disaster strikes, something Robertson implies is inevitable since the people of Dover have “voted God out of [their] city.” Unlike Robertson, I don’t anticipate a plague of locusts soon swarming into York County, Pennsylvania. Instead, I’m afraid that the teaching of evolution to the youth of York County will prove to be plague enough. After all, who needs locusts when our children’s minds are being plagued by the Darwinian notions that life is neither sacred nor significant, that man is just another temporal creature whose longevity is determined by his fitness, and that all truth is arbitrary since God is nonexistent.

No, the good people of Dover need not fear an impending plague of locusts. They may do well, however, to remember the tragic tale of Columbine High’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As frightening as it is to contemplate, the tragedy of Columbine could be repeated in any community where God has been expelled from the public schools and children are being taught the moral bankruptcy and utter despair of Darwinian evolution.