A bill approved yesterday by the Indiana Senate to allow the teaching of creationist arguments in public schools is being criticized as bad science education by the Cover-Up Institute, the nation’s leading think tank for masking the religious motivations behind arguments against evolution.

If made law, Indiana Senate Bill 89 (SB89) would allow creationism, a religious view on the origin of species, into the Hoosier state’s biology classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Instead of scrapping SB89 in deference to legal precedent, the Indiana Senate has amended the bill to allow more religious views on origins, as if simply dressing up their arguments with religiously neutral, “sciencey” phrases would not cure the original problem.

“Instead of injecting religion into biology classes, legislators should be working to promote religiously-motivated pseudoscience without mentioning religion,” said Josiah Oldbrother, a law and policy analyst at Cover-Up Institute’s Center for Shrouding & Cloaking. “There are plenty of scientific-sounding criticisms of Darwin’s theory today, and science students should be able to hear about them, not about the religious beliefs that inspired them.”