The US faces a steady flow of serious attempts to limit or eliminate the teaching of evolution in its schools. As such, it's almost a relief to be able to report on something that was never a serious threat to public education: a lawsuit filed by someone who thinks he has mathematically demonstrated that evolution is a religion. The lawsuit targeted everyone from the local school board to the federal Department of Education with the director of the National Institutes of Health thrown in for good measure.

The person in question, one Kenneth Smith, resides in West Virginia and filed his most recent suit there. In it, he accuses the defendants of "propagation of religious faith in our West Virginia public school machinery and government at large." The faith? Evolution, which allegedly "just doesn't exist and has no math to back it."

Text in the defendants' responses to this suit and the court's ruling on the matter indicate that this isn't Smith's first go round with the legal system on this matter. In addition, the plaintiff, while representing himself, filed a blizzard of paperwork supporting this suit. Unfortunately, his grasp of both the legal system and the English language are limited, as the court appears to have struggled to figure out what exactly was being argued. Phrases like "as best this court can tell" and "generously construed" litter the decision.

Ultimately, the court decided that Smith's claims "relate to the West Virginia Defendants’ refusal to teach public school students the Plaintiff’s 'mathematical system of genetic variations that proves evolution is a religion.'" (Elsewhere, the ruling refers to "Plaintiff’s theories of science and religion, which, to put it mildly, are antagonistic to the theory of evolution.")

But as the defendants noted, we've been here before. Supreme Court precedent indicates that teaching of evolution is perfectly compatible with the US Constitution. And the suit has done nothing to indicate that precedent shouldn't apply: "The Plaintiff’s allegations, which consist of fleeting references to federal law followed by diatribes against the Defendants, do not constitute even '[t]hreadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action.'"

So the suit has been tossed with prejudice. But based on past behavior, don't expect that to slow Smith down.

The National Center for Science Education has been collecting some of the documents pertaining to this lawsuit.