At first blush my reaction to this article was that trying to stop an elective course covering intelligent design, creationism, and evolution as a philosophy course was ill-advised. After all, it gets it out of science class and into a philosophy class. That makes good sense. We shouldn’t be trying to stop that sort of thing.

However, on closer examination, the course is hardly structured to be an objective a-religious survey of the cultural impact of creation mythologies. The course is centered on 24 videos, 23 of which were produced by religious organizations. There are 2 advertised evolution experts who will speak. Unfortunately, one has refused to come and the other has been dead for years.

In theory, having courses surveying religion and its impact on culture should be mandatory. In practice, they are impossibly hard to implement. The people who tend to feel these courses are important tend to slant them hard toward their own theology. The people who could deliver them objectively, largely don’t care to. And if they did, they would invoke the wrath of the religious right anyway.