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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, attempts by community groups to mandate the teaching in public schools of intelligent design alongside evolution seemed to introduce a new concept into education. In reality, it was just another chapter in the centuries-long debate on whether faith can control or even make a contribution in scientific inquiry.

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Lead: In the first decade of the twenty-first century, attempts by community groups to mandate the teaching in public schools of intelligent design alongside evolution seemed to introduce a new concept into education. In reality, it was just another chapter in the centuries-long debate on whether faith can control or even make a contribution in scientific inquiry.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In the end the debate over intelligent design is political, not scientific. The vast majority of scientists and teachers of science, including those with deep faith commitments, correctly perceive this not as a dispute among biologists or other scientific specialists. They see it correctly as an attempt by well-meaning people--usually people of faith--to insert into education, mostly at the high school level and through local political pressure, teaching about an intelligent designer.

Increasingly rejected by the scientific community, marginalized except in the most intensely sectarian Christian school systems, and frustrated by the courts, anti-evolutionists in the 1990s turned to intelligent design. The fundamental tenet of this concept is that nature reflects an “irreducible complexity” which can only be explained by some force, independent of nature, which possesses directive intelligence and supernatural design.

Whether it is the Judeo-Christian God or some other unidentified divine entity, the advocates of intelligent design insist that, absent the acknowledged presence of some outside defining creative force, scientific inquiry is reductionist and materialistic. The fear on the part of these mostly fundamentalist or some--by no means all--evangelical Christian partisans is that evolution, with its accompanying notion of random mutation and natural selection, absent a divine creative force, establishes a world in which moral concepts (such as good and bad and right and wrong) are culturally relative and not absolute. They feel this demotes humanity and removes it from the rank of special creation.

The campaigns in Kansas, Pennsylvania and other regions in the first decade of the 21st century were rejected by the vast majority of educators and scientists, including many devout Christians in those disciplines, who feel this is an inappropriate attempt by political means to hijack the teaching of science and inappropriately make it a servant to the enterprise of faith.

In America, in contrast to most of the rest of the industrialized world, these efforts enjoy the sentimental support of significant majorities of voters and parents. Seventy percent of evangelical Christians believe that living things have always existed as they do now. More than fifty percent do not believe in evolution and only 40 percent of the American population actually believes in evolution. Only the population of Turkey is ranked lower among modern industrialized societies. This is reflected in the ever declining confidence in higher education and science in American public opinion.

Yet, the debate over intelligent design is not new; it is just another chapter in the ongoing and sometimes tense relationship between people of faith and those committed to scientific inquiry in the modern era. Since the Renaissance, periodic upswings of religious fervor have been followed by periods in which people of faith insist that their convictions be acknowledged in the development of public policy and in scholarly endeavors.

The Copernican view of the universe and Galileo’s teachings, the abandonment of religion by intellectuals in the so-called Enlightenment, the publication of the writings of Charles Darwin, the transformation of modern society away from religion after World War I, the gradual decreasing importance of religion in the formulation of public policy in the Western world, and the slipping number of people who actually practice a living robust faith make those who still value religion very concerned. It compels them to assert their influence in those areas, such as local education, over which potentially they can assert--even temporarily--control.

The vast major of scientists and teachers insist that their work is the examination of natural phenomena, not the evangelization of students or the inculcation of religious values. The advocates of intelligent design insist that science without morality produces a barren societal landscape, devoid of beauty, love, and spiritual generosity. Those somewhere in between, usually moderate people of faith who celebrate the work of the scientist while still deriving strength from their commitment to the divine, agree with Michael Shermer when he suggests that, “Christians should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity.”

This is a debate that will continue as long as there is a robust religious community rich in votes in a modern society that is also dependent on the achievements and productivity of an unencumbered science and unpoliticized education.

Research by Beverly Davidson and Nancy Waldo, at the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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