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."
That's the line you're hearing from many politicians: "I think students should learn all sides of an issue," etc. Sounds reasonable, right? No nice person could possibly take exception, right? Ah, but many do. They're afraid intelligent design - especially when it gets capitalized, as in Intelligent Design - is just "warmed-over creationism," anti-scientific Christian fundamentalism looking for a back-door into classrooms. In school districts throughout the land - in Dover, Pa., in Kansas, in Michigan, and elsewhere - debate rages over whether these ideas have any place in the way we teach our children science.
The answer is… yes, they do.
Not a big place, but a legitimate place. A respectful place. In our middle schools and high schools, when evolution is the subject, teachers should take time to mention, and encourage discussion of, these ancient and modern beliefs about the origins of existence and life. To avoid such mention would be unnatural. Nor would it educate our children well: They'll be going out into a world of many beliefs, and the well-educated American kid should know both Genesis and Darwin.
Textbooks, too. Do what many science textbooks already do. Take the "blue box" route: While discussing evolution, draw the reader's attention to a sidebar on intelligent design , a side-discussion giving it airtime and respect. Do you even need to say the words intelligent design ? Optional. Your blue box could say simply, "There are other accounts of the beginnings of life. Many religions teach that life, indeed all existence, has a divine origin. These belief systems are worthy of respect and consideration; they are the bedrock for the lives of billions of people."
But when making these responsible gestures, go only so far and no further:
Do not teach science and belief "alongside" each other. That would be misleading. Science is science; intelligent design is religion. The two are different modes of knowing. They are incommensurate, with different focuses, standards of evidence, and goals. They should be taught - separately - as two sources of wisdom, two great signposts directing humankind into the future. You can't build a railroad by reading the Torah, and you can't baptize a child by reciting the Periodic Table. Why would you try? Science and belief are not in a race; they are not alternatives; they do not and need not compete. Don't teach our children that they do.
Do not present them as "sides." Once more, with feeling: They are not "sides" in an argument. They are different ways of considering the hallowed question of our origins.
Do not give them "equal time" in any science course. Evolution is science. That's what to teach in a science course.
Do not pretend that evolution is "only a theory" or is somehow "in trouble." False and again false. Evolution is a theory-with-the-status-of-fact, richly and spectacularly illustrated by experiment, observation, and experience. It is the central organizing principle of modern biology. To give students any other impression is to mislead them. Please: Don't mislead them.
The picture, to be sure, is incomplete. Science can't tell us how this thing called life got started. There are some pretty good guesses, but we don't know. We don't know enough about the state of the early Earth, its oceans, its atmosphere. How you get from sterile seas to nucleic acids is a mind-numbing question. The existence of any proteins (and there are more than 20,000) is extremely, extremely improbable.
And you want improbable? Try life itself. But scientists generally see these mysteries as intensely interesting, as opportunities, not "problems" or "scandals." Many scientists cheerfully admit we'll probably never know the whole story. Evolution is a dynamic theory: As we learn more, we tweak, modify, augment it every day. Hey, that's not a problem - that's science.
Do not label science as anti-Christian or label intelligent design as Christian. Two more falsehoods. Science has nothing to say about God, soul, or the afterlife. These are not things science can test. The statement "God does not exist" is not scientific. Neither is "God exists."
It's also wrong to teach intelligent design as only a Christian notion. Our curriculums should be for all the people, all our kids.
Do not capitalize the words intelligent design as a proper noun. That would accord too much dignity to a fringe religio-political movement agitating to get its message into op-ed pages, schools, and minds.
Is there an inherent "conflict" between religion and science? Well, there's no important clash between physics and Sufism, acoustics and animism, botany and Buddhism. True, evolution is thought to proceed by randomness and chance. If you do Zen, you might be fine with that. But some religions don't like it. For them, God would never do anything that way.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Christoph Schäborn, Catholic cardinal of Vienna, wrote that "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity' are … an abdication of human reason." Guess he votes no.
Then again, many folks think evolution is, in fact, the method of an intelligent designer not bound by human notions of orderly progress. For them, no problem.
But some seem bent on setting science and religion on a collision course. Some churches teach that their sacred books have only a single, literally true meaning. Once you've thus straitjacketed the word of God and the human mind, two trains start barreling down the track at each other.
"The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork." So says Psalm 19. "Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge."
Billions of people have seen - still do see - a divine hand in creation. Billions. It's not science, but it's not superstition, either.
Existence is a miracle, and, as science shows every blessed day, it has a fearsome, ineffable, exalting loveliness. Chemists cry at sunsets, and the greatest minds in history have proclaimed both belief and unbelief. No one holds the knockout card; you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Focus, then, on what we shall teach our children. Don't turn their minds into the fields of Armageddon. Treat those minds as the fertile fields they are, to be seeded, watered, and set to grow. On this issue, above all, let there be light.