صفحة جديدة 1

'Intelligent Design' and the Classroom

Friday, December 30, 2005; A26

The key to the controversy about "intelligent design" ["Judge Rules Against 'Intelligent Design'; Dover, Pa., District Can't Teach Evolution Alternative," front page, Dec. 21] is curiosity -- the desire to know. We've got questions about the world, we want the answers and we want them now.

Though science gets us as close to this kind of knowledge as we can get, science works slowly. Once every couple of centuries it takes a giant stride (Copernicus, Einstein), but it generally takes baby steps that it then subjects to revision. We, on the other hand, can't wait. When our curiosity focuses on "the big picture," we fill in for ourselves what science hasn't yet given us.

What we use for filling in is myth. The picture we finally settle for comes partly from science and partly from myth. The myths vary enormously, from personal fantasy (the tooth fairy) to conventional wisdom (the Greek pantheon) to pop hypotheses (intelligent design) to religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism). Myth reaches the level of religion when accompanied by rituals, moral precepts and the bureaucracy to interpret these and back them up.

To fail to distinguish between science and myth is to confuse faith and reason. Both are essential components of the human condition, and both are worthy of study. Intelligent design is thus an appropriate classroom subject. Call it mythology, call it folklore, call it religion. Just don't call it science.

ALAN PASCH

Silver Spring

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said intelligent design is a "proposition on which the court takes no position." That statement is important to reporter Michael Powell's assertion that Judge Jones "explicitly sought to vanquish intelligent design, the argument that aspects of life are so complex as to require the hand, subtle or not, of a supernatural creator."

Judge Jones's intention was to vanquish not the notion of intelligent design but rather those who would insinuate religious doctrine into a science classroom. The trial was never about intelligent design's worthiness or lack thereof. It wasn't even about determining what, exactly, constitutes science. It was about identifying what is not science and what, in this case, is religion and thus defending, by extension, the constitutional separation of church and state.

JAN STOWELL

Boekel, Netherlands

My reaction upon reading that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III had upheld the separation of church and state in our schools: There is a God!

STEPHEN SAMUELS

Washington