First, a nitpick: when referring to the canon of Christian scripture, it is customary to capitalize the "B" in "Bible." This is not only a gesture of respect, but it is also used to distinguish the specific usage from the general usage for any book considered authoritative in its field (from Dictonary.com).

Such classes are being approved by school boards precisely because they want to endorse Christianity...

Does this logic apply when school districts decide to teach "awareness" types of curricula about Islam, homosexuality, etc?

...and that is exactly what the curricula are generally designed to do.

This is more difficult to prove one way or the other. While I support the concept of teaching about the Bible in public school classes (it *is*, after all, a huge part of the foundation of Western civilization), I do agree they should be unbiased and free of errors such as the NASA claim.

What I do know is that the Texas Freedom Network providing much of the criticism in the NYT article is hardly an unbiased source. They appear to be the secularist left's answer to the Christian Coalition. And unfortunately, if you scrutinize a lot of public school textbooks, you'll find them to be "riddled with errors"--from revisionism in history textbooks to debunked evolutionary concepts such as human embryos exhibiting gills.

Finally, I personally have high hopes for the curriculum to be released this fall by the Bible Literacy Project. From what I've read about it, it takes a very balanced approach and should be free of associations with evangelical groups. My guess is that the Texas Freedom Network will find reasons to oppose it, as well, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

By the way, Kevin Drum is pointing to this article as "a virtual showcase of the worst that journalism has to offer"--not because of the POV it portrays, but because the facts it offers are basically a series of quotes from various factions.

First, the lack of capitalization of Bible was not intended to show disrespect and I apologize for it. Please chalk it up to laziness more than ill intent. Eric wrote:

Does this logic apply when school districts decide to teach "awareness" types of curricula about Islam, homosexuality, etc?

Depends on what the curriculum is like, I'd say. The only "islam awareness" curriculum I'm aware of at all is the one from California, and from what I've read of it I do think it crosses that line and should be changed. As far as homosexuality goes, I'm not aware of any specific curricula on that subject so I couldn't say.

What I do know is that the Texas Freedom Network providing much of the criticism in the NYT article is hardly an unbiased source. They appear to be the secularist left's answer to the Christian Coalition. And unfortunately, if you scrutinize a lot of public school textbooks, you'll find them to be "riddled with errors"--from revisionism in history textbooks to debunked evolutionary concepts such as human embryos exhibiting gills.

While I have friends involved with the Texas Freedom Network, I am always cognizant of the fact that they are an advocacy group and therefore prone to oversimplifying things. As far as the last claim goes, the claim that textbooks still contain Haeckel's errors is vastly overblown when it is not outright dishonest. In most textbooks, it is mentioned only in pointing out that Haeckel was wrong about recapitulation, but right in many of his other observations about embryology, and that his work was important in laying the groundwork for modern evo-devo concepts. If you got that information from Jonathan Wells' book, I would suggest digging a little deeper and you'll see that Wells was far more dishonest in describing what the textbooks said than the textbooks were in describing Haeckel's work.

Finally, I personally have high hopes for the curriculum to be released this fall by the Bible Literacy Project. From what I've read about it, it takes a very balanced approach and should be free of associations with evangelical groups.

I agree on this and expect that curriculum to be much better. Certainly the group putting it together are serious scholars, not hacks like David Barton and a bunch of young earthers. I'm not opposed to Bible classes, though I'd much rather see comparative religion courses taught. In fact, I think a comparative religion course would be among the most valuable classes we could teach. But it seems to me that any Bible course that offers "evidence" like the NASA myth and thinks Carl Baugh should be greeted with anything other than laughter and derision is clearly out of bounds and has no business being in any public school. This is stupidity on the level of Holocaust denial and has no place in any curriculum.

By the way, you can now read the full report on this curriculum, which was written by Mark Chancey, who teaches biblical studies at SMU. Always better to read the report rather than dismiss it because it was sponsored by a group we disagree with (and I mean that for my side as well as yours). And it's a nice touch that Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Norris are on the advisory board of the group that put out this textbook.

In most textbooks, it is mentioned only in pointing out that Haeckel was wrong about recapitulation, but right in many of his other observations about embryology, and that his work was important in laying the groundwork for modern evo-devo concepts.

It sounds like you're describing college textbooks here, because I've never seen a H.S. textbook that discusses the development of theories in that kind of detail. I have, however, seen H.S.-level biology texts that have a figure somewhere with pictures of embryos of different animals, with a caption pointing out the "gill slits."

Nevertheless, my point here is not to claim that evolutionists are liars and frauds, but to point out that primary and secondary school textbooks are, very unfortunately, often "riddled with errors"--of outdated debunked theories, bias, omission, poor editing, etc.

Eric wrote:

I have, however, seen H.S.-level biology texts that have a figure somewhere with pictures of embryos of different animals, with a caption pointing out the "gill slits."

I'm not sure why this is a problem or what you think is false about it. All vertebrate embryos do have gill slits, also sometimes called pharyngeal arches, gill arches, or bronchial arches (or pouches). That doesn't mean they have gills, and no scientist claims that they do; gill slits or gill arches are not the same as gills. But the pouches can be differentiated and in all vertebrate species they differentiate to form the same features - the first pouch or arch always forms the jaw, the second always forms the hyoid, for example. The third and subsequent arches form gills in fish, but in humans form the thyroid, cricoid and arytenoid cartilages.

Wells has made a huge deal out of them commonly being referred to as "gill slits", but the argument is mostly irrelevant. Regardless of what one labels them, the salient facts for the study of evolutionary development remain true: the shared morphology of all vertebrates and the similar pathways of development controlled by closely related genes. As my friend Nick Matzke wrote:

Given that the initial pharyngeal arches are radically rearranged over the course of development, there is no obvious reason why all vertebrate embryos begin with virtually identical structures that are equally remote from their final morphology, other than that they reflect a shared morphological foundation and a common ancestry.

Here's an excellent page on the 'gill slits' issue as it appears in Wells' anti-evolution arguments; it also has a discussion of textbooks towards the end:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/haeckel.html

I'd agree with Eric to the extent that it wouldn't at all surprise me that lots of h.s. textbooks radically oversimplify the structure of the argument for evolutionary theory & how the similarities across embryos fits into it. And I'm sure at least some get things out and out wrong, with 'vestigial' bits of older, now-discredited science floating around in them. But I do wonder, once we distinguish texts that merely oversimplify from those that actually make factual errors, whether or not most of the problematic h.s. bio texts today would be in the first category, but not the second. I don't know what the answer is, but Ed is right that it's not settled by pointing out that many of them use the 'gill slits' label.

I also suspect that if we distinguish "has a few errors, mostly by incorrectly retaining what had been the operative science of an earlier decade" from "is riddled with errors, including lots of stuff that was made up from whole cloth", that even the worst of the h.s. bio textbooks will be more in the first category, whereas this curriculum sounds like it's squarely in the second.

All I'm saying is that I've seen this comparative embryology (or whatever the technical term is) presented in a way that is overly simplistic and misleading. Since we're talking about deficiencies that critics have found in textbooks, I believe it is relevant.

there is no obvious reason why...other than that they reflect a shared morphological foundation and a common ancestry.

A person who believes in a Creator, of course, would identify this "shared morphological foundation" as a sort of basic design theme from which the Creator made variations. Sort of like how all motor vehicles have basically the same design to transfer power from the engine, through the transmission, to the axle, to the wheels.

Ah, I see that phil beat me to the "oversimplification" point.

Eric wrote:

All I'm saying is that I've seen this comparative embryology (or whatever the technical term is) presented in a way that is overly simplistic and misleading. Since we're talking about deficiencies that critics have found in textbooks, I believe it is relevant.

But the example you gave doesn't support that point. There is nothing misleading about it. They are commonly called "gill slits" or "gill arches" (along with several other terms used interchangably). The fact that they are homologous among all vertebrates is undisputed, as is the fact that each separate arch develops into homologous structures in all vertebrate species. Certainly it is simplified, it's a high school biology text after all, not a college embryology text. But there's nothing misleading about it, the information is accurate.

There is a big difference, I think, between finding a few flaws in textbooks (which surely isn't difficult to do) and having a curriculum that is literally full of false claims and that presents the work of outright frauds and cranks as evidence.

If a HS biology text includes Haeckel's embryo drawings, in which--according to Wikipedia--he "overemphasized similarities between embryos of related species," and/or mentions "gill slits" without explaining that they don't have anything to do with gills in species other than fish...you don't think there's anything misleading about that?

The Discovery Institute has documented that as of 2003, at least one US biology textbook still contained the Haeckel drawing, and two had recently removed it.

I'm not arguing bio textbooks are as bad as the NCBCPS' Bible curriculum. On the other hand, I do think there are probably "diversity" curricula which are just as bad. And despite the documented flaws in the Bible course material, the criticism of it by the Texas Freedom Network is naturally overwrought due to their particular viewpoint and agenda.

Eric wrote:

If a HS biology text includes Haeckel's embryo drawings, in which--according to Wikipedia--he "overemphasized similarities between embryos of related species," and/or mentions "gill slits" without explaining that they don't have anything to do with gills in species other than fish...you don't think there's anything misleading about that?

This is a very poor "and/or" statement. The first part of it depends entirely on the context. For instance, there are textbooks that both mention and show the Haeckel drawings as examples of false claims that have been corrected. Surely it's not inappropriate to do so in that context. It should also be noted that Wells and the Discovery Institute have a habit of not distinguishing between those contexts (more on this in a moment). The second part of the and/or - using the term "gill slits" (or "gill arches", another common term - is, as I said above, not misleading at all. It's a very commonly used term and it is used because those arches are what develop into gills in fish. The same arches develop into different traits in different vertebrate species, often controlled by a closely related developmental gene. And this would almost always be explained in the text. The DI is simply straining at gnats here to claim this is misleading.

The Discovery Institute has documented that as of 2003, at least one US biology textbook still contained the Haeckel drawing, and two had recently removed it.

Actually, the site you referenced didn't quite say that. It said that two had removed the drawings and the third "has not yet released its changes." But even there, they don't give you any context for how the drawings were used. In no case were those drawings used as an argument for Haeckel's long-discredited "biogentic law", not for well over half a century. The drawings were simply used to demonstrate the similarities between vertebrate embryos during the phylotypic stage, and those similarities were real. The fact that the actual drawings contained some inaccuracies not related to what they were intended to show was not well known until a few years ago and now textbook publishers have begun replacing them with photomicrographs of actual embryos. But the notion that the drawings were used to support the false biogenetic law, or recapitulation, is flatly false.

The DI has a bad habit of eliminating this kind of useful context when it doesn't help their case. Wells doesn't just claim that Haeckel's drawings were used, he claims that his recapitulation theory continues to be taught and he lists 9 authors from 1894 to 2000 who discussed recapitulation. What he doesn't tell you is that every single one of them rejected the idea, as far back as the late 1800s. While claiming that biologists keep "resurrecting recapitulation" and that Haeckel's theories "have periodically risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of empirical disconfirmation", Wells himself cites biologist after biologist debunking Haeckel's theories going back over 100 years.

Wells even claims that Stephen Jay Gould "kept his mouth shut" about the problems with Haeckel for over 20 years until Michael Behe exposed the issue. This despite the fact that Gould wrote an entire book on the subject, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, in 1977 and that book contained a thorough debunking of Haeckel's theories on ontogeny and recapitulation. It's this kind of dishonesty that should make people take the DI's pronouncements on what scientists believe and do with a very large grain of salt.

And despite the documented flaws in the Bible course material, the criticism of it by the Texas Freedom Network is naturally overwrought due to their particular viewpoint and agenda.

Have you actually read Chancey's report on the curriculum? I would suggest that if anything it actually understates the problems. I exchanged a series of emails with him today about some of the false quotations from the founding fathers contained in the curriculum. If anything, he was too generous in his assessment of that subject. The amazing thing is that those false quotes managed to get in the text and stay in it despite the fact that David Barton - who is on their advisory board, for crying out loud, and whose writings were the source of the quotes - disavowed them long ago.

Ed,

I think we agree that context is key for using Haeckel's drawings or the "gill slits/arches" term. Don't you agree then, that to someone who isn't already familiar with the terminology and its usage, referring to a feature on a human embryo as a "gill slit" without explaining what that term means, would be misleading?

What neither of us seems to have is a collection of contemporary HS biology textbooks to see how each one presents this information. I know I've seen examples that were misleading, but it's possible they may have been from older textbooks.

Also, I'm still dubious of your defense of textbooks using the Haeckel drawings "simply...to demonstrate the similarities between vertebrate embryos during the phylotypic stage." Even if it wasn't well-known until recently that Haeckel overemphasized the similarity between species (what, no one really looked at the diagrams for the last 50 years?), why would textbooks continue to use drawings which were associated with claims now known to be false?

Have you actually read Chancey's report on the curriculum?

No, not yet. But I think it's self-evident that an advocacy group is going to portray something they oppose in the worst possible light. I can't endorse this particular Bible curriculum, but I hardly think that it's the kind of ominous threat to public education that the Texas Freedom Network implies that it is. It is an elective course, after all. I'd rather see a more academic and balanced curriculum myself, but when the TFN starts dragging out all the usual "Religious Right" boogeymen (creationists and David Barton and the Family Research Council, oh my!), you know they're in full activist mode.

Eric wrote:

I think we agree that context is key for using Haeckel's drawings or the "gill slits/arches" term. Don't you agree then, that to someone who isn't already familiar with the terminology and its usage, referring to a feature on a human embryo as a "gill slit" without explaining what that term means, would be misleading?

If a textbook just had a picture of an embryo and the words "gill slit" without any explanation at all, I would regard it as pointless, but not misleading. The term is still an accurate usage. But I can't imagine there is any textbook that has such a thing. What would be the point of including such a picture if it didn't pertain to the written text discussing how those structures develop into different parts of the vertebrate anatomy or, at the very least, that they are homologous structures in all vertebrates?
The fact that we can think of hypothetical ways to badly present this subject doesn't mean it's actually done that way anywhere.

Also, I'm still dubious of your defense of textbooks using the Haeckel drawings "simply...to demonstrate the similarities between vertebrate embryos during the phylotypic stage." Even if it wasn't well-known until recently that Haeckel overemphasized the similarity between species (what, no one really looked at the diagrams for the last 50 years?), why would textbooks continue to use drawings which were associated with claims now known to be false?

Because the DI folks like to gloss over a very important distinction between Haeckel's observations about embryonic development, which were almost entirely accurate, and his theories about what those observations meant. The theories have long been discredited, despite the DI's dishonest insistence to the contrary, but his observations about embryonic homologies remain true to this day. Indeed, with far more detailed knowledge today from photomicrographs of still developing embryos, we know of many more such similarities and even are able to pinpoint the genes that control them and, in many cases, even pinpoint the exact mutation that causes a given embryonic structure to develop in different ways both within species and between them. Time and advancing technology has only solidified his observations, even while discrediting his explanations. The DI likes to conflate his observations and his theories to make it sound as though any mention of Haeckel or even of embryonic homologies at all means one is using outdated ideas, but that is simply dishonest and false.

But I think it's self-evident that an advocacy group is going to portray something they oppose in the worst possible light. I can't endorse this particular Bible curriculum, but I hardly think that it's the kind of ominous threat to public education that the Texas Freedom Network implies that it is. It is an elective course, after all. I'd rather see a more academic and balanced curriculum myself, but when the TFN starts dragging out all the usual "Religious Right" boogeymen (creationists and David Barton and the Family Research Council, oh my!), you know they're in full activist mode.

Nowhere has TFN claimed that the course is an "ominous threat to public education". They have claimed that it is an unconstitutional endorsement of a sectarian religious viewpoint and they have claimed that it is riddled with errors and poor, even laughable, scholarship. They are dead right on both counts. TFN didn't drag out the creationists and David Barton, the curriculum itself did and it did so in an incredibly shoddy way; TFN only pointed out that it does so. Carl Baugh and David Barton are rightly criticized because they are charlatans, a charge I am more than capable of defending as absolutely accurate (and have already done so in many places). I'm a bit baffled that having not read the report or the curriculum it criticizes, you're certain and continue to defend the assertion that the report is exaggerated. But I've read the report, corresponded with the author, compared it to the curriculum itself and to earlier versions of the curriculum and criticisms of the earlier versions (Dr. Frances Paterson was kind enough to send me her Journal of Law and Education article on the 2003 version of this same curriculum), and I can say with full justification that the criticism could actually have been even worse than it is. The important thing, of course, is that the criticism is accurate. And you can't possibly judge whether it is without reading the report and the relevant parts of the curriculum being criticized.

I'm a bit baffled that having not read the report or the curriculum it criticizes, you're certain and continue to defend the assertion that the report is exaggerated.

Well, Ed, we've reached the point in a debate where you're once again putting words in my mouth, so this will be my last comment in this thread.

I haven't said anything about Chancey's report, because I haven't read it. I don't have quite the luxury of free time right now that you apparently do. What I've said is that, as an activist group, the TFN is obviously going to portray the curriculum in the most negative light possible--just like the DI portrays high school biology books. Now, you obviously think the DI is a dishonest group and the TFN are good guys on white horses. Personally, I think all advocacy groups spin the facts as much as possible and if I had the time to research the TFN, I bet I'd find examples where they've been very shady with their "facts."

BTW, I'm curious how you've obtained copies of not only the current NCBCPS curriculum, but also earlier versions of the curriculum for your personal perusal.

Finally, to continue beating a dead horse, I am baffled that you continue to defend using the term "gill slit" to describe human embryos without explaining that has nothing to do with gills in humans. It should be obvious how that can mislead a beginning biology student. In fact, I've encountered amateur evolution advocates / creationism critics who'll make a "Panda's Thumb" type argument by asking "If humans didn't evolve, why do human embryos have gills?"

Eric wrote:

Well, Ed, we've reached the point in a debate where you're once again putting words in my mouth, so this will be my last comment in this thread.

I haven't said anything about Chancey's report, because I haven't read it.

I had no idea you were making a distinction between Chancey's report and TFN's statements about it. The only thing TFN did was ask Chancey to review the curriculum and publicize his work. Nowhere have they suggested that the course is an "ominous threat to public education", as you said, which means that so far the only one who can reasonably be excused of exaggerating anything is you. And the fact that both the report and their statements have focused on "religious right boogeymen" like Baugh and Barton is because the curriculum itself uses those men's shoddy and dishonest work. The fact that they are frequently criticized doesn't mean they don't deserve the criticism, a fact you have not even attempted to deny. So we're still at the same place - you haven't read the report, you haven't pointed to anything TFN has actually said on this subject that is inaccurate or exaggerated, and the one thing you have imputed to them is itself inaccurate and exaggerated. Pots and kettles, Eric, pots and kettles.

Now, you obviously think the DI is a dishonest group and the TFN are good guys on white horses. Personally, I think all advocacy groups spin the facts as much as possible and if I had the time to research the TFN, I bet I'd find examples where they've been very shady with their "facts."

I bet you would too. But in this particular case, having actually taken the time to examine the record before reaching conclusions about it, I'm telling you that the criticism of this curriculum is not only on target, it could have been harsher than it was. You're turning a general statement into a specific statement without having done any of the work necessary to justify it. The fact that President Bush has told lies doesn't mean that one should presume that everything he says is a lie. It does perhaps mean that one should remain skeptical, but skepticism doesn't mean assuming the worst, it means examining the evidence before reaching a conclusion, something you haven't bothered to do. If you don't have time to do so, which is perfectly understandable, then it's better, I think, to withhold judgement until you do rather than making unjustified accusations about a specific issue.

BTW, I'm curious how you've obtained copies of not only the current NCBCPS curriculum, but also earlier versions of the curriculum for your personal perusal.

Through the kindness of friends, who I will not name because of possible copyright violations (ironic in and of itself given that the curriculum contains so much plagiarized and unattributed material). I haven't received the full curriculum, which is nearly 300 pages, but I've received specific chapters that are the target of criticisms so I could compare the text and the critique of it in the two primary areas my posts have focused on, science and history.

Finally, to continue beating a dead horse, I am baffled that you continue to defend using the term "gill slit" to describe human embryos without explaining that has nothing to do with gills in humans. It should be obvious how that can mislead a beginning biology student. In fact, I've encountered amateur evolution advocates / creationism critics who'll make a "Panda's Thumb" type argument by asking "If humans didn't evolve, why do human embryos have gills?"

As I said, the various terms used for this feature are all accurate. If it were to appear all by itself without any explanation of embryological development, it would be pointless but not misleading. But since there is not in evidence any textbook written so badly that it contains nothing more than a picture and the words "gill slits" without any explanation of how vertebrate embryos develop, we're only debating a hypothetical that no one knows exists. And the fact that some people didn't pay enough attention in biology class doesn't mean the class was misleading. It more likely means they have no business discussing the subject.

"Gill slits" is no more automatically misleading about evolution than "Adam's apple" is about creation. The problem isn't that such terms are intrinsically confusing, but that there are biological confusions that are already out there -- untenable versions of recapitulation & creationism, respectively -- that such terminology can feed into. There are numerous cases of terminology that is potentially problematic (e.g., "vocal cord", which isn't terribly cord-like), but which is fully established in its domain & thus fully legitimate to use in relevant textbooks. In the absence of evidence that textbooks are actively confusing on these matters, there's no reason to think ill of any of these terms. (Indeed, even in the presence of such evidence, it would be the texts in question, and not the terms, that should be held accountable.) That some handful of people out there have gotten a hold of some bad arguments for evolution is not something to blame on the terminology, especially since we have no evidence that they picked up those bad arguments from their biology classes.

One thing that's odd about Eric's argument here is that he seems to think that the use of the term "gill slits" is somehow stacking the deck in favor of evolution. But the case for evolution is actually _stronger_ with embryonic gill-slits-that-aren't-ever-gills than it is with actual embryonic gills. In the latter case, one could tell a story in which the similarities between fish and mammal embryos was dictated by some actual function, i.e., the need to have gills. (E.g., maybe embryos need to 'breathe' in utero that way for a stage of their development, until their lungs are more formed.) But in the former (i.e., actual) case, the similarity between the different embryos cannot be explained in terms of a shared function.

By the way, it's probably a bit of a mistake to assimilate Haeckel's argument to "Panda's thumb" arguments. "Panda's thumb" arguments aim to show the empirical inadequacies of ID by its inability to accommodate klugish elements of anatomy, which natural selection predicts there should be a fair amount of in the world. But Haeckel was not so much a Darwinist as a Lamarckian and, moreover, a Hegelian, believing that there was a teleological direction of evolution towards ever-greater perfection. So you'd get different predictions from his theory of evolution than you would from natural selection, particularly with regard to "Panda's thumb" types of situations.

There are some interesting epistemological issues raised here about how to deal with arguments that come from advocacy groups, and under what circumstances one can simply preemptively dismiss their contentions out of hand vs. what circumstances one should still pay them some degree of credence. We need to distinguish between cases of spinning while constrained by a basic respect for the truth, and cases where the degree of spinning & outright lying demonstrates a more or less complete disregard for the truth. Sometimes a group has proved itself to have such complete disregard for the truth that one figures the odds of any given complex argument containing a major lie is at least as good as the odds of its not doing so. Such circumstances may be restricted in various ways, such as by domain or author: I won't automatically doubt anything that the DI says about the Bible, for example, since I haven't known them to get the actual text wrong there, but I will automatically place no confidence at all in any claims they make about what "evolutionists" have or haven't said, because they have such a staggeringly awful track-record on such claims. It's not because they are motivated that they can't be trusted -- it's because they have been shown over & over again that they get things wrong. (Ditto with any claim one sees on Democrat Underground about, well, anything, but particularly about any wrongdoings by the Bushies.)

But I have yet to hear any reason to think that the TFN should have such status about any of their claims -- granted, this might be because I haven't ever heard of them before this week! -- so, in the absence of such a track-record, I think something like Ed's approach is the right way to go. Approach their claims with some degree of skepticism, check a few major claims at random (it sounds like Ed has checked even more than that), and if things hold up, then you can take a 'trust, but verify' attitude towards their arguments more generally. In this case, I can do a mix of some of the spot-checking myself, and trusting Ed's checking, since his track-record on these sorts of things seems to me to be pretty good (even though he himself has an advocacy interest here). In short, concern about motives should lead one to an initial, limited skepticism, but track-record evidence can serve to either expand or reduce that skepticism over time.

Very well said on all counts, philosopher.

Perhaps we should split the course into two parts or have two courses.
One taught by someone who believes the Bible to be a message from God and one by someone who believes it is simply a book.

If the Constitution is based upon the bible, then one should be able to point to provisions in the Constitution and to their analogs in the bible, but there are none. On the other hand, one can trace provisions of the Constitution directly to the work of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locks and Montesquieu, the men who actually did lay down the blueprint for our Constitution.

This is misleading. Locke and Montesquieu may have been Enlightenment thinkers, but that does not make them secular thinkers. Their most important ideas are, in fact, explicitly Christian.

Montisquieu, for example, took his doctrine of separation of powers almost directly from the Calvinist doctrine of the total depravity of man. Believing strongly in the total depravity of man, and the need for civil government to restrain man's selfish behavior, Montisquieu advocated a separation of powers by which power checks power. as a result of Calvanism, Montisquieu believed in man's inherently wicked nature and in a theory of natural law drawn directly from God's law; this was the philosophical foundation from which Montisquieu built his ideas. Thus, in The Spirit of Laws, Montisquieu begins to reason towards a separation of powers:

"But the intelligent world is far from being so well governed as the physical. For though the former has also its laws, which of their own nature are invariable, it does not conform to them so exactly as they physical world. This is because, on the one hand, particular intelligent beings are of a finite nature, and consequently liable to error; and on the other, their nature requires them to be free agents. Hence they do not steadily conform to their primitive laws; and even those of their own instituting they frequently infringe...

As an intelligent being, [man] incessantly transgresses the laws established by God, and changes those of his own instituting. He is left to his private direction, though a limited being, and subject, like all finite intelligences, to ignorance and error: even his imperfect knowledge he loses; and as a sensible creature, he is hurried away by a thousand impetuous passions. Such a being might every instant forget his Creator; God has therefore reminded him of his duty by the laws of religion... Formed to live in society, he might forget his fellow creatures; legislators have, therefore, by political and civil laws, confined him to his duty...

The Christian religion, which ordains that men should love each other, would, without doubt, have every nation blest with the best civil, the best political laws; because these, next to this religion, are the greatest good that men can give and receive."

Second only to Montisquieu in the eyes of the founding fathers was Sir William Blackstone. Blackstone, of course, is largely credited with the theory of natural law, which states that human laws are subject first to the Divine laws found in the Bible.

Blackstone said, and the founding fathers agreed, that "the first and primary end of human laws, is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals." Thus America got her love of rights and freedom, which contrasts sharply with other domanant political theories of the day.

For an even more stark example, we can look at John Locke. Widely considered to be once of the most profoundly influential philosophers in forming the American revolution, John Locke was a moderate Calvinist who, like Montisquieu, drew his philosophy from his religion. His line about "life, liberty, and property", which finds expression in our 5th and 14th amendments, as well as the declaration of independence, was a straightforward application of Calvinist covenant theory as expounded by the Rev. Samuel Rutherford in "Lex, Rex".

Calvinist covenant theology held that God's covenant with man is two-fold: a covenant of law and a covenant of grace. Without getting too far into the details, I don't think it'd be controversial to say that this view found secular expression in a number of philosophies, notably the view that men, in a state of nature, formed a government by mutual consent and gave it certain limited authority to act to protect their basic rights (life, liberty, and property). This "social contract theory" was also the foundation for the popular rallying cry: "Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God".

So we see that much of the foundational ideology expressed during the revolution, and even the justification for revolution itself, was simply the secular application of Calvinist doctrine.