A federal appeals court yesterday vacated a lower-court decision that declared unconstitutional a Georgia county's science textbook stickers calling evolution a theory

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit criticized the district court for issuing its ruling against the stickers despite insufficient evidence and remanded the case back to the district court for new proceedings.

The stickers in the Cobb County textbooks informed students "evolution is a theory, not a fact."

Joel Oster, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, argued "no school should be in trouble for simply stating the facts."

"That's what schools are supposed to do," he said. "Though we wish the appeals court would have ruled on the constitutional merits of the case without sending it back to the district court, we are pleased that the district court's ruling against the school district has been vacated."

The 11th Circuit wrote: "The problems presented by a record containing significant evidentiary gaps are compounded because at least some key findings of the district court are not supported by the evidence that is contained in the record."

The full text of the court's ruling can be read here [PDF file.

The lower court judge agreed the stickers were not applied to the textbooks for a religious purpose and had no religious content.

But he regarded the stickers a violation of the so-called "separation of church and state," arguing many people were aware Christians supported the stickers.

ADF, in its friend-of-the-court brief, said the district court's analysis will "lead to absurd results."

The First Amendment's Establishment Clause – "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" – was "never meant to prohibit the passage of a secular law, for a secular purpose, simply because Christians actively lobbied for the law," ADF contended.

The sticker applied to each textbook read:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

The Cobb County school board placed the disclaimer on the books in 2002 after more than 2,000 parents complained the schools were not teaching about the controversy over evolution among scientists and not informing students of alternative theories.

After the 2004 trial, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Michael Manely, representing parents who sued the suburban Atlanta school district over the textbook labeling, contended the school board was "doing more than accommodating religion. They are promoting religious dogma to all students."

A biology textbook author testified in the trial, asserting the school was wrongly bringing religion into its teaching by questioning evolution, which he regarded as the foundation for much of modern science.

However, a specialist on the legal aspects of teaching evolution maintained the ACLU was twisting the case, making it an issue of motives and not evidence.

"Perceived motives are irrelevant," said Seth Cooper, an attorney with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture. "Whether a parent in the community might be religious certainly has no bearing on whether neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories are supported by scientific data. But such motives are also largely irrelevant to the issues being decided by the judge in this case."

The Discovery Institute has been the biggest promoter of "intelligent design," a theory that the complexity and order of the universe and mankind suggest the action of an intelligent cause rather than random chance, without attempting to identify that cause.

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