The question here in Australia, as elsewhere, is whether to teach Intelligent Design in schools. It depends what you mean by 'teaching', or rather, by 'not teaching'. I have a feeling that many of the teachers who oppose ID in the classroom actually mean suppressing any mention whatever of ID, lest the young minds get polluted by religious fundamentalism. I would find it hard to imagine any responsible teacher today, in a class on evolution, not raising the subject of ID. Surely the goal is to raise a generation of kids who are capable of refuting this hypothesis, and how do you do this without investigating it?

A few hunches:

1. The most vocal opponents of teaching ID are probably teachers who themselves could not give a coherent account of evolution, and of the gaps in evolutionary theory. In other words, they'll be people for whom evolution is every bit as much an article of fundamental, unexamined faith as any of the rantings of a Texas snake-waver.

2. They will be teachers who, if they teach climate change, present the theory of anthropogenic climate change as absolute, unquestionable gospel, and who, similarly, would never dream of admitting a sceptical examination of it in their classrooms.

For the record, I don't like the ID hypothesis. I certainly don't have enough science to be able to refute it myself, but I feel that, at a deep level, it is basically anti-rational. Why not call on God to explain the various puzzles of quantum physics. You don't know how that particle suddenly blipped from point A to point B? Well, God must have done it.