Judge Jones Turns Historian

Judge John Jones, who struck down the Dover, Pennsylvania school board's intelligent design policy, gave the commencement address at his alma mater last weekend.  (HT:CT)  Basking in the limelight of his ruling, apparently he has now turned to setting the record straight on the founders' view of religion:

"The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free, rational inquiry," said Jones, who was thrust into the national spotlight by last year's court fight over the teaching of evolution in the Dover school district.

The founding fathers - from school namesake John Dickinson to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson - were products of the Enlightenment, Jones said.

"They possessed a great confidence in an individual's ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the exercise of his or her reason," he said.

It seems a bit strange that, after criticizing the Dover school board for setting up a false conflict between religious belief and rational inquiry, Judge Jones is using a woefully simplistic characterization of the founders' beliefs to set up a false conflict between rational inquiry and "something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible." 

Rob