The Separation of Church and State

            While looking into Justice Felix Frankfurter stated in his opinion on McCollum v. Board of Education, "We have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors." (Moore 1) For the past century in America and ideological war has been fought in our legislatures, courts, and schools. Some parts of the Christian fundamentalist movement have repeatedly tried to prevent the teaching of the Darwinian principles of evolving in public schools since they see it as an intimidation to their spiritual beliefs. Darwin's theory declares that species emerge over eons of time, developing in ancestor-descendant relations from one species to another. Darwin's theory commonly understood as standing in primary conflict with the Bible tale of the creation of the world described in Genesis, which asserts that the world is only a few millennia old including that God created man and all of the species of animals in a single epoch. The latest battle in this conflict is the argument of Intelligent Design (ID). Robert Weitzel affirms that "IDers maintain that life is too complex to have developed solely by evolutionary mechanisms. They believe an intelligent designer could have just engineered the complexity. Strategically, they refrain from identifying the nature of the designer. This tactic is intended to give their notion of creation a patina of scientific credibility and protection from First Amendment challenges" (1). Intelligent Design advocates have propelled forward on multiple aspects to try and introduce it into school curricula all across the country, and they are converging with a measure of success and a good deal of popular support. While the ID movement enjoys broad support from the populace, particularly in traditionally stable areas, it is crucial that the instruction of Intelligent Design kept out of public school curricula because of the separation that needs to be maintained between religion and state.