A trial is starting in just days on a claim by a space scientist that he was demoted for expressing his views on intelligent design, the theory that the universe and life are too complex to have randomly erupted from a puddle of sludge on some prehistoric landscape.
The case is a response to a punishment handed down to David Coppedge, a worker at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which sent the unmanned spacecraft Galileo to Jupiter and dispatched a ship named Dawn to orbit asteroids Vesta and Ceres.
The case will be tried starting Wednesday in Los Angeles, where the Superior Court of California earlier refused to rule in favor of the lab without a trial. The court determined there is sufficient evidence for a jury to consider....