"We felt that if we just dug underneath it and used the engine of cross-examination, we could really expose how flimsy intelligent design is as a scientific proposition." Eric Rothschild, Lead attorney for the Dover case plaintiffs Photo: © Forrest Stuart MacCormack

Still, he says, evolutionary thinking and religiosity need not be mutually exclusive. The story of creation--like the story of the prodigal son--might be seen as a parable, as deriving its power "independent of the question of whether they actually happened in space and time." Genesis answers the question of why the world exists, but not of how it came to be. Believers in intelligent design, says Steinmetz, are disingenuous in arguing that their view is religiously neutral. They have "reversed the proper order of knowing," as he puts it. "People do not believe in an intelligent designer because they observe in nature the marks of intelligent design. Indeed, the opposite is true. People find intelligent design in the natural order because they believe on other grounds in the existence of an intelligent designer."

From his reading of the intelligent-design record, Rothschild suspected that a star witness for the defense, Michael Behe, a biochemist from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, would wither under tough questioning. Behe, on the stand, argued that intelligent design is "a scientific theory that proposes that some aspects of life are best explained as the result of design." Denying that intelligent design is rooted in religious beliefs or convictions, Behe said the concept "is based entirely on observable, empirical, physical evidence from nature plus logical inferences." The "best, most visually striking" example of design, he testified, is a bacterial flagellum, which he compared to an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim. The flagellum, he claimed, represents a "purposeful arrangement of parts" that "bespeak design."

Rothschild led Behe through a long discussion of bacterial basics. "Now, the intelligent designer," Rothschild asked, "when he was forming a bacterial flagellum millions or billions of years ago, you're not suggesting he was actually modeling his design after a manmade rotary motor which didn't exist until the last century?" Wouldn't a credible explanation, he wondered, be an evolutionary explanation--that is, a subset of parts eventually evolved to become, through natural selection, the bacterial flagellum?

And, asked Rothschild, wouldn't noxious entities like the AIDS virus and anthrax qualify as designer products? "Can you explain why would the intelligent designer design an irreducibly complex system and then another one to combat or fight it?"

In his questioning of Behe, who wrote a major text of intelligent design, Darwin's Black Box, Rothschild pounded away particularly on the nature of science. His strategy, he says, was to get the adherents of intelligent design to acknowledge that "intelligent design is explicitly an attack on how science is currently practiced, and the only way you can call intelligent design science is if you redefine science to allow for supernatural causation. So that was what we presented, the argument that you can't have the supernatural be part of science. It doesn't mean the supernatural isn't true. It doesn't mean God doesn't exist. God could very well exist, but that's not knowable by science."

Behe turned out to be an unwitting contributor to that strategy. At one point, Rothschild surrounded him with a pile of fifty-eight articles, nine books, and a couple of book chapters, all of which documented the evolution of the immune system. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe claims that there was no way to get from the precursor to the final immune system; he could not find a single peer-reviewed article, he wrote, on how the immune system evolved. Rothschild says, "He has raised the bar for what science has to demonstrate, so that you have to almost evolve the immune system in the lab in front of his eyes to satisfy him. It's really very insulting to all the scientists who do this research and publish these articles, saying, none of it is good enough for me. And at the same time, he doesn't submit any of his own articles for peer review."

At the trial, Rothschild pointed out that evolutionary theory has produced 140 years of scientific papers. "Zero is the number of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals that argue for intelligent design of complex molecular systems." There are "gaps or unexplained phenomena" in all scientific theories, including germ theory, atomic theory, and plate tectonics, Rothschild said. "You're not aware that students are taught some other theoretical perspective so that they can understand the facts and not confuse germ theory with germ fact?" Why should evolution, he inquired, be singled out for its problematic qualities?

Skull wall: cladogram from Darwin exhibit at American Museum of Natural History depicting evolutionary relationships among groups of primatesPhoto: © Denis Finnin, AMNH

Intelligent design, Behe conceded, doesn't accommodate the common definition of a scientific theory, at least the definition outlined by the National Academy of Sciences--a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and testable hypotheses. Under Behe's broad definition, wouldn't astrology be considered a scientific theory, even though it proposes no explanation for physical laws? Rothschild asked. "There are many things through the history of science which we now think to be incorrect which would fit that definition," responded Behe. "Yes, astrology is, in fact, one, and so is the ether theory of the propagation of light."

Rothschild noted that no major scientific organization has endorsed the science or the teaching of intelligent design, and that even Behe's closest colleagues in Lehigh's biology department uniformly support evolutionary theory and see no basis in science for intelligent design. "Although I do think that intelligent design is well substantiated, I think there's not ... an external community that would agree that it was well substantiated," Behe said.

It may be scientifically insubstantial, but the Dover policy would seem to square with the sentiments of much of the American public. A Harris poll conducted last June showed that 55 percent of adults surveyed believed that children should be taught creationism and intelligent design along with evolution in the public schools. The same poll found that 54 percent did not believe humans had developed from an earlier species. Such persistent anti-evolutionary thought in America has a lot to do with American religiosity. In his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), historian Richard Hofstadter observes that the Scopes trial put into high relief "the juncture between populist democracy and old-fashioned religion."

In a 1988 essay, "Religion and the Resurgence of Conservatism," Duke professor of political science Michael Gillespie and Michael Lienesch, a colleague at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted an apparent paradox with politics and religiosity: The United States, unlike Britain--where the currency now carries Darwin's image--has no established church. But that fact has forced religious denominations to struggle for political power as one of numerous interest groups and has led them to forge strong connections with government. Historically, they wrote, Evangelicalism in particular has influenced American politics through its egalitarian and individualistic impulses. It has also campaigned against aspects of modernization and secularization, particularly the perceived breakdown of social mores. Evangelicals offered themselves as "a rallying point for conservatives to take the offensive in reasserting their role as cultural custodians, defenders of traditional rural and small-town values."

By the 1920s, custodial conservatives were looking askance at classrooms accommodating Darwin. That sort of accommodation would fire up their moralistic crusade. More than seventy years later, former Speaker of the House Tom DeLay, reflecting on the Columbine High School massacre, ascribed youth violence in part to "the teaching of evolution in the schools."

But the debate reveals more than the pull of religion; it also points to distrust of the expert and the intellectual. William Jennings Bryan's "full-throated assaults upon the 'experts' were symbolic of the sharply deviating paths being taken by the two sides," according to Hofstadter. Taking that idea into the present, Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic, argued last summer in the magazine that, "Since its inception, modern American conservatism has harbored a suspicion of experts, who, through adherence to inductive reasoning and academic methodologies, claim to provide objective research and analysis." The Bush administration, in his view, "takes the radically postmodern view that 'science,' 'objectivity,' and 'truth' are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda, that experts are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn't even merit a hearing."

Duke philosophy professor Alexander Rosenberg contrasts American cultural tendencies--large membership in religious institutions, disdain for the cultural elite, resistance to authority, and broad acceptance of the idea that one's station in life is earned and not the product of random forces--with the opposite tendencies in European societies. Rosenberg was cited in the Dover testimony; the defense referred to one of his articles in the journal Biology and Philosophy, which, by their interpretation, documented the culturally "destructive power" of Darwinian theory. On matters of science, Americans show "a huge schizophrenia," he says. They're eager to claim the benefit of scientific advances. But they often see science as inappropriately privileged or just another special interest. (A cartoon that's become popular with his colleagues shows a conversation between a doctor and a creationist-patient; the doctor says he needs to know "whether you want me to treat the TB bug as it was before antibiotics or as the multiple-drug-resistant strain it has since evolved into.")

"Even in the university, you've got academics in humanities departments, postmodernists, deconstructionists, people who are on the anti-science side of the culture wars," says Rosenberg. "They'll make common cause, in fact, with the fundamentalist Christians in their repudiation of the special authority of science as a description of reality--except when they flick on a light switch, or get on an airplane, or go to the doctor. They have nice rationalizations for that schizophrenia. But in my opinion, it's just a silly attitude." Among academics, he says, advancing the agenda of the Enlightenment has become unfashionable.

A world that's disordered and changeable isn't a God-deprived world, says David Steinmetz of the Duke Divinity School. But a world in which the end point of human life is purely the passing on of DNA--Darwinism understood as an extreme materialistic philosophy--is not going to be seen as theologically defensible.