The course teacher, Sharon Lemburg, is a special education teacher with a degree in physical education and the social sciences. Philosophy does not feature on her resume, but her marriage to a minister of the Assembly of God church does. The Assembly of God is a Christian fundamentalist, pro-creationist church, and Lebec, home to 1,300 souls, has become the latest frontline in the debate over intelligent design.

While the debate rumbles away in Kansas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania, it has found its spiritual home in southern California. For the last hundred years or so, as Carey McWilliams chronicles in the admirable collection of his writings Fool's Paradise, southern California has provided a welcoming home for all manner of religious offshoots, wacky beliefs, cults, messiahs and worse.

The Mighty I AM movement, with its deity Saint Germain and his earthly messengers Guy Ballard and his wife Edna, took hold in the 1930s before ending in his death and her conviction on fraud. Modern astrology also came of age in southern California, and can still be seen today with the ubiquitous roadside fortune-tellers. Annie Besant established a home to await the next coming of the Messiah, but she was some years after the coming of the next best thing, Sister Aimee McPherson. Arriving penniless in 1922, so the legend goes, in three years she collected more than $1m from her congregation and owned property worth $250,000. She built the Angelus Temple, with an auditorium capable of holding 5,000 people, and her revivalist meetings attracted thousands of people and thousands of dollars. But her rise ended with a faked disappearance in 1926 and her arrest on charges of having given false information. The charges were subsequently dropped and she died from an overdose of sleeping powder in 1944. Today southern California is the spiritual home to a movement with a deity to match anything from the past, Scientology.

The southern Californian manifestation of intelligent design is no straightforward matter. While a group of parents has filed a lawsuit alleging that the school is violating the separation between church and state by teaching intelligent design, its advocates are unhappy too. Smarting from their defeat last month at the hands of a Pennsylvania judge who dismissed the theory as "an interesting theological argument but ... not science", supporters of intelligent design have argued that the course is misleading because it suggests a philosophical rather than a scientific debate. Their intention to present intelligent design within the mainstream of scientific debate is being stymied by the creationists' insistence on seeing everything through the eyes of God.

"It's clear that the course wrongly mixes intelligent design with ... biblical creationism," said a letter from the Discovery Institute to the school board. Intelligent design, the letter continued, "is based upon empirical data, rather than religious scripture" and "does not try to inject itself into religious discussions about the identity of the intelligence responsible for life."

But, allege opponents of the school's actions, the school board described its course as philosophy precisely to avoid the potential illegality of teaching intelligent design or creationism as science following the Pennsylvania ruling.

A description of the course circulated to parents in December said: "The class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid. The class will discuss intelligent design as an alternative response to evolution. Physical and chemical evidence will be presented suggesting the earth is thousands of years old, not billions."

Most of the evidence comes from videos. The original syllabus for the course listed 24 videos that would be used for instruction, 23 of them produced by religious groups. One, made by a group called Answers in Genesis, is titled Chemicals to Living Cells: Fantasy or Science.

In a letter to lawyers representing parents opposed to the class, the school superintendent, John Wright, wrote: "Our legal advisers have pointed out they are unaware of any court or California statute which has forbidden public schools to explore cultural phenomena, including history, religion or creation myths."

He would, he said, "promptly intervene if anyone should stray into teaching or advocating the tenets of any religion or creed, including intelligent design."

Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has brought the lawsuit on behalf of the parents, believes that the course is a blatant attempt to teach intelligent design, but under the auspices of philosophy instead of science.

"There is a national crusade under way to inject religion into our public schools, and it must not succeed," said Mr Lynn. "Religious Right activists are looking for every opportunity to proselytise students into their doctrines."

All of which brings us to the 15 teenagers enrolled in the Philosophy of Design course. "Personally, I don't know what to think," 15-year-old Jeremy Hurst, told the Los Angeles Times. Hurst's father is a scientist and one of the parents involved in the lawsuit. His mother takes him to Baptist church every Sunday.