Debate over intelligent design theory

Senator may sponsor bill allowing theory to be taught in state

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 21, 2005 at midnight

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The Colorado legislature may debate the theory of intelligent design, which was barred from the classroom Tuesday by a federal judge in Pennsylvania.

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, said he is strongly considering introducing a bill allowing schools to teach the theory that life forms show evidence of an intelligent creator.

The legislature convenes in January.

Brophy's remarks came after a ruling by District Court Judge John E. Jones III that a curriculum adopted by the Dover, Pa., board of education violates the separation of church and state.

The decision applies only to Jones' Pennsylvania district, not Colorado.

"It's one more judge following in a long line of activist judges instituting his secular values over the top of everybody else," Brophy said of the Pennsylvania ruling.

Brophy said the bill he is considering would let local school boards adopt an intelligent-design curriculum, but not mandate such instruction.

"I firmly believe in local control, and I want local school districts to do things for the right reason, not because they've been made to do them," he said.

Allowing districts to teach intelligent design "opens up the debate and it raises that issue up in everybody's minds so we can take a look at it," Brophy said.

While the intelligent-design debate has raged in neighboring Kansas, it has not emerged as an issue in Colorado.

Under the Colorado Constitution, curriculum is decided by 178 local boards of education.

However, statewide academic standards are the basis for questions on tests administered under the Colorado Student Assessment Program.

The standards include items about evolution, but they are silent on whether the process was guided by intelligence.

The science standards are currently undergoing a five-year review.

Jo O'Brien, an assistant to the education commissioner who heads the review process, said this month that she has not heard from citizens interested in debating the issues of evolution and intelligent design.

O'Brien could not be reached Tuesday.

James Platt, a University of Denver biologist who follows public school curriculum issues, said intelligent design has grass-roots support, but has not come up before school boards recently, as far as he knows.

Evolution is the theory that life forms changed over the course of time.

Intelligent-design proponents do not necessarily reject evolution, but say that structures as complicated as the eye, for example, could not have developed by natural selection alone, as claimed in classical Darwinian theory.

Intelligent design differs from creationism, which embraces the biblical account of creation in six days.

Jones' ruling Tuesday slammed the Dover, Pa., board of education for trying to sneak the explicitly religious outlook of creationism into the curriculum under the guise of intelligent design.

In Colorado, Rabbi Joel Schwartzman, who opposes intelligent-design instruction in schools, hailed the ruling.

"It's a wonderful thing, and the judge is dead on in terms of his decision," Schwartzman said.

"I don't think that the religious folks who bring forward this kind of argument are doing this country any good in terms of trying to confuse science with religion," he said.

Schwartzman said intelligent-design theory is irrelevant to science because it cannot be tested.

"You cannot verify, you cannot test intelligent design in the laboratory, and, therefore, the argument leaves you no further down the road scientifically than you were when you started," Schwartzman said.

"It doesn't give you anything."

But Doug Groothuis, a philosophy professor at Denver Seminary, said claims of intelligent design are subject to the same standards used by archaeologists and anthropologists to decide that artifacts are of human origin.

For example, an investigator coming upon Mount Rushmore would recognize it as of human origin, Groothuis said.

That some intelligent-design proponents are religious doesn't disprove the argument that biological forms show evidence of purpose, Groothuis said.

"It's a minimal claim. It's not a gigantic claim about everything being designed and everything having a purpose - God looking out for us, caring for us. It doesn't directly speak to those things," Groothuis said.

"It has no religious presuppositions," he said.

"But even though the point is a small point, it's gigantic because it challenges the dominance of philosophical materialism in science," Groothuis said.

"That's what people get so upset about."

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