Intelligent Design

As the Dover, Pa., trial on teaching intelligent design in public schools develops in our own backyard, the National Constitution Center, 525 Race St., will hold a forum about the case today at 6:30 p.m. The event is free, but reservations are required at 215-409-6700.

America's culture war moves tomorrow to a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, where religion, science and law will collide in a closely watched trial over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Both sides in this latter-day version of the Scopes "monkey trial" will be playing to national audiences, with the outcome likely to influence how biology is taught far beyond the Dover, Pa., school district that spawned the case. "We're very, very concerned about it," said Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society.

On Monday, in a round-table discussion with journalists from five Texas newspapers, President Bush said he thought intelligent design should be taught to students alongside evolution. "Intelligent design" is the belief that the universe and the Earth show evidence of a thinking, purposeful plan. That belief is thousands and thousands of years old; the phrase is of fairly recent coinage. President Bush made his remarks in the broadest, blandest terms: "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.

Outside the Dover fire hall last week, taking a break from a video lecture on "Why Evolution Is Stupid," Judy Grim blamed Darwin's theory for America's moral woes. "If I'm taught there is a God I'm responsible to, I know I have to treat people right," said Grim, 63. "But if there's no creator to answer to, it changes your whole lifestyle. Then it's just survival of the fittest. That's where our society is headed. That's why we have so many of the problems we do. " The nation's latest battle over evolution, spawned in this rural York County town, exposes a deep and persistent cultural division that is uniquely American.

A decision is expected today in the first-ever federal trial on the teaching of intelligent design - a ruling that will likely have far-reaching impact on the future of science education in the United States. Judge John E. Jones 3d will issue his ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover today, said Gary Hollinger, chief deputy clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued the Dover Area School District in York County last year, saying the board violated the constitutional separation of church and state when it approved a policy introducing intelligent design into the high school biology curriculum.

The advocates of "intelligent design," spotlighted in the current courtroom battle over the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pa., have much larger goals than biology textbooks. They hope to discredit Darwin's theory as part of a bigger push to restore faith to a more central role in American life. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," says a strategy document written in 1999 by the Seattle think tank at the forefront of the movement.

In the thinly disguised play based on the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, the Clarence Darrow character (Drummond) cross-examines the William Jennings Bryan character (Brady). To prove how intolerant Brady is in defending the law that forbade the teaching of evolution, Drummond asks Brady to suppose that Mr. Cates, the Scopes character, "had enough influence and lung power to railroad through the state legislature a law that only Darwin should be taught in the schools!" Brady responds by saying, "Ridiculous, ridiculous!"

For three weeks, witnesses have taken the stand here in federal court to challenge the teaching of intelligent design at Dover Senior High School. Now, it's the school board's turn to respond. Defense attorneys for the Dover Area School District in York County expect to call their first witness today in the civil trial over the introduction of intelligent design into a high school science curriculum. The first scheduled witness for the defense is Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University and one of the country's best-known proponents of intelligent design, which is a concept based on the belief that life is so complex there must have been an intelligent creator behind it. Eleven parents sued the district last year over a new policy requiring that students be read a four-paragraph statement saying that "gaps" exist in Darwin's theory of evolution and that an alternative theory, intelligent design, exists.

When intelligent design is taught in science class, critics say, it's a violation of the First Amendment: unconstitutional promotion of religion. When intelligent design is banned from science class, supporters say, it's a violation of the First Amendment: unconstitutional limit on free speech. The front lines in the battle between evolution and intelligent design are shifting. No longer is it just a debate over whether intelligent design qualifies as science. Now intelligent-design advocates argue that evolutionists are trying to stifle the free flow of information.

In Dover, a new round of science vs. religion Sept. 25, 2005 Intelligent design is comforting. Evolution is unsettling. . . . This basic fear - a fear that belief in evolution will lead to atheism - lurks behind much of the movement to accept intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the origins of life. . . . Still, there's an understandable desire to see God's handiwork in the exquisitely complex world around us, and intelligent design is seeking to express that desire in terms that sound scientific.

RECENTLY, Richard Aregood wrote in this paper that I believed in intelligent design. With all due respect to the Pulitzer Prize winner, I need to edit that comment. While I have sympathies for those who want to express an alternative view to the theory of evolution (First Amendment and all,) I find nothing to convince me that an intelligent designer exists. A few examples: * Eric Holder: Our esteemed attorney general has decided that it's bad to force voters to provide identification when they show up at polling places (Fraud?

To those of us who like science, the difference between science and religion can seem pretty self-evident: Religion requires faith, for one thing, and science demands evidence. But that doesn't always satisfy the true believers. "You can't prove there isn't a God," they say, "and if scientists can't prove God didn't create people, how can they claim their 'belief' in evolution is any less religious than religion?" In 2005, with the country watching, the task of answering that question fell to U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who had to untangle the nature of science and religion to decide whether "intelligent design" theory could legally be taught in public-school science classes in Dover, Pa., near York.

HARRISBURG - In 2004, almost 80 years after Tennessee teacher John Scopes attemped to resolve the battle between teaching evolution and creationism in U.S. classrooms, parents in a central Pennsylvania school district filed a suit that reignited the debate. Eleven residents of Dover, 25 miles southwest of Harrisburg, sued over their school board's decision to introduce "intelligent design" into the high school biology curriculum. Their suit contended that teaching intelligent design - which holds that the universe is so complex that a supernatural force must be at work - violated the constitutional separation of church and state because intelligent design is a religious concept, not a scientific one. The 40-day trial drew worldwide attention as it pitted renowned biologists and paleontologists against Dover school board members and intelligent-design theorists.

"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, male nipples, impacted wisdom teeth, flatulence and hiccups. One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design - the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life - is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III could have taken the safe route and retreated to the privacy of the courthouse after issuing his landmark ruling in December against intelligent design. Most judges are loath to go public about their cases at all, let alone respond to their critics. But Jones - angered by accusations that he had betrayed the conservative cause with his ruling, and disturbed by the growing number of politically motivated attacks on judges in general - came out from his chambers swinging.

The York County school district defeated in the first-ever lawsuit over the teaching of intelligent design has agreed to pay $1 million to cover the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees in a settlement lawyers said was designed to discourage school boards from considering similar action in the future. Attorneys representing a group of parents who sued the Dover Area School District in 2004 said that while the court order entitled them to $2.067 million, they settled the judgment for half that amount to recognize the community for voting out most of the board members who had approved the policy.

What if God spoke, and said: "What's this intelligent design stuff? That ain't science!"? Would ID proponents keep on talking? "Well, not if you redefine science" . . . "There's too many holes in the theory of evolution" . . . "Life is too complex for it to be the product of random mutation" . . . "This is academic censorship!!!" Rather than hurling down serpents, frogs, and thunderbolts, The Divinity might clear the throat and politely restate: "Sorry, one more time: Intelligent design is not science.

AS LONG as we have lawyers, judges and professors like Perry A. Zirkel (op-ed, "Dover decision smart design," Jan. 3), the legal mumbo jumbo will continue ad nauseam. As Professor Zirkel pointed out, the Epperson v. Arkansas decision in 1968 started a consistent line of decisions on intelligent design, and we haven't seen the end yet. What he failed to mention was that the people of Dover with one simple democratic action should have settled it. The Dover voters threw out the school board and intelligent design with it. That's democracy in action - not the fiasco of a trial that followed.

The school district at the center of a national debate over evolution last night swiftly buried the controversial policy that put it there. Voters here in November kicked out almost all of the board members who had originally imposed the policy. The reshaped school board last night voted unanimously to remove intelligent design from high school biology classes. The step was only a formality, coming two weeks after U.S. District Judge John E. Jones 3d ruled that the Dover Area School District violated the U.S. Constitution when it approved the policy in 2004.

THE BATTLE between religious fundamentalism and secular pluralism, which has taken its toll in lives in other countries such as Afghanistan, is fortunately fought here in the courts. The Constitution provides the framework, and the public schools, the context. The issues include school prayer, ranging from graduation ceremonies to football games, and the Pledge of Allegiance, ranging from forced participation to the words "under God. " The common denominator is the First Amendment's proscription against the government making any law "respecting an establishment of religion.