The case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District opens next week in a federal court in Harrisburg. It started last year when the Dover school board decided to allow teachers to discuss "other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design." A group of parents, supported by the ACLU, sued the school board. The event is being called the Scopes trial of the 21st century.

		Rudolph H. Weingartner, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, lives in Squirrel Hill (rudywein@ comcast.net).

The latest phase of this controversy reminds me that in the latter part of the 19th century, Princeton had an endowed chair for a "Professor of the Reconciliation of Science and Religion." While I'm an emeritus professor of philosophy, that was not my job while I was in harness. But now, retired, I want to give this task a try and look at the relationship between intelligent design and the Darwinian theory of evolution it proposes to replace.

As a professor might say: I will attempt to show these two accounts to be potentially complementary.

No such effort, however, would have been possible with intelligent design's predecessor in the public eye -- Bible-based Creationism. The Earth, according to those literalists, is at most 10,000 years old, while geologists all agree that the earth's age exceeds 4 billion years. This puts a stop to reconciliation long before we get to talk about the origin of species.

Intelligent design proponents, however, make no such literalist assumptions. Their claim is that there are phenomena that natural selection cannot explain, such as the existence of certain complex systems like the human eye, or such processes as the clotting of blood. One must hypothesize, instead, that an intelligent designer was responsible.

Evolutionists, to be sure, reply that their theory can indeed explain how such complicated developments came about. But surely it will always be possible to find new ways to challenge Darwinism. While evolutionists might want to claim that their theory can in principle explain how all living entities came to be, they also know that this will never be possible in actuality. There is no way to come by all the data for such a feat, since much of it is buried in what is a very long past indeed. In this way, Darwinism resembles virtually all other scientific theories: they are incomplete, evolving and likely to remain incomplete.

Look now at the other side. One intelligent design proponent is quoted in The New York Times saying that "All ideas go through stages -- first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted." But surely not all ideas. Early in the 19th century the supposed science of phrenology was first accepted by quite a few, then attacked, and finally completely discredited. Those bumps on peoples' heads turned out not to signify anything at all. Intelligent design will go the way of phrenology as long as its adherents think of their doctrine to be a science that competes with evolutionary theory.

But is it a science? For a claim to be scientific, it must -- in principle, at least -- be falsifiable. We must be able, in other words, to envisage some condition, however unlikely it might be, that would show the claim to be false. When that condition is ignored, every kind of nonsense becomes possible.

I could invent, on the spot, my own creation science and propose that the living beings surrounding us were created by a spirit that hovers over the Earth but returns home to the center of Sirius every time you look for him. Given this mini-theory, no condition can even be imagined that would show the claim to be false; there is no way to confirm or disconfirm it. You can believe in my hovering spirit or, better, dismiss the assertion as silly.

But surely intelligent design need not be dismissed in so summary a manner. A closer look suggests that its account belongs to a most significant tradition. The intelligent designer is not some ludicrous spirit from Sirius, but God in the Judeo-Christian tradition of God the Creator. We are now not speaking of an object of science, such as atoms or molecules. Nor do we expect, within that tradition, to be able to envisage a condition --however improbable -- that would show that there is no God after all.

In short, it is not news that the belief in God is a matter of faith. There are no definitive arguments that prove that God exists nor are there relevant scientific experiments. Indeed, most theologians in the Judeo-Christian tradition regard faith to be at the center of religion, a faith that sets religion apart from the realm of science.

That brings me, finally, to my role as conciliator of science and religion.

To those whose religious faith tells them that all living species were created by God, the intelligent designer, I say: Why assume that He kept incredibly busy throughout the ages creating and snuffing out the huge number of species that fossil records show there to have been? Why not suppose, instead, that the intelligent designer devised the clever method of natural selection that his faithful servant, Charles Darwin, was able to discern so many eons later?

Indeed, not long after Darwin published "The Origin of Species," a distinguished orthodox rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, made the same point more eloquently. If natural selection is indeed the way species come to be, he declared, it would call for "even greater reverence than ever before to the one sole God Who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus, and one single law ... in order to bring forth ... the infinite variety of species we know today."

"Teach the controversy," say the adherents of intelligent design, that between their views and that of the Darwinians. There is no such controversy, I reply. Teach both -- teach evolutionary theory in biology class and intelligent design in Sunday School.