As God part of "intelligent design"?

• Position: YOUR LIFE

Eighty years after the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the anti-evolution forces have regrouped. Today, the battle in school districts from Kansas to Pennsylvania is over the teaching of "intelligent design," the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

Advocates of intelligent design try to portray themselves as a modern-day Scopes, victims of a dogmatic pro-evolution establishment that will not allow their scientific view into the schools. The central issue, however, is whether intelligent design is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy, creationism in camouflage, maintains Keith Lockitch, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, Calif.

Proponents of intelligent design aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself--not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."

Intelligent design adherents claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory--that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain. Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they claim, because it does not require that the intelligent designer be God. "Design," writes another leading proponent, William Dembski...