Ricky Eastwood was short and wiry, his hair buzz-cut. His eye burned behind thick glasses, and he was speaking so vehemently that spittle flew. I don't remember what set him off that day, but I'll never forget his diatribe.

He was utterly disdainful of people who believed God had created the universe, of people who believed in a god at all. He was a committed atheist, and the theory of evolution was the only intellectually acceptable explanation for how we'd ended up seated next to each other in third grade science class. I'd never encountered such anger in a child before and was so perplexed that I thought it best to remain silent until I could escape to recess.

His diatribe sprang to my mind during coverage of the intelligent design case unfolding in federal court in Harrisburg. The conflict, which has been many months in the making, continues to surprise me -- not least because I am blissfully unconcerned as to its outcome. My thinking about the origin of species has evolved considerably since third grade but what hasn't changed is the naked condescension displayed by pro-evolutionists toward any of us who have the temerity to doubt their creed.

What also hasn't changed is journalists' failure to turn as skeptical an eye toward all sides in this century-old debate as they do toward those they deride as Bible-thumpers. One of the parents who filed suit against the Dover Area School District, a pleasant and reasonable woman, explained her opposition to intelligent design thus: "Science isn't about who. It's about what, and why, and how."

As a straddler of the two camps, I'd respond, "Really? Let's take a closer look..."

Those sympathetic to the plaintiffs in the Dover case accuse Christian fundamentalists of intellectual dishonesty for using intelligent design theory as a means to introduce God into the classroom. I have no doubt that in some quarters that charge is true, but arguing against Dover school board members' motives is meant to avoid addressing the theory's scientific merit. It was persuasive enough that British philosopher Antony Flew, a renowned atheist who spent years decrying C.S. Lewis' work, announced a year ago that he is a Deist, though not a Christian.

I have my own problems with religious people -- usually so gifted with metaphor and symbolism -- who refuse to employ those same skills when contemplating the first few chapters of Genesis. But there are many other places where charges of intellectual dishonesty or lack of imagination can and should be leveled but are not -- beginning with the ideologues who teach scientific theory as fact.

Maybe it should go without saying that science isn't about "who," but science also cannot honestly address "why" and can rarely answer "how" -- and those are two big questions that evolutionary theory boldly, perhaps falsely, claims to answer.

Evolutionary theory sidesteps the first "how" -- how matter, energy and "being-ness" came into being -- and fudges subsequent how's, claiming that higher species evolved from simpler ones without any historical record to support that claim. The "missing link" has yet to be found.

As for "why," evolution posits that species evolve to preserve themselves, to preserve life. But why? Why life? That's a question science can't answer; it is philosophy or religion. When science writers and thinkers try to answer the why's by using, as they often do, phrases such as, "Nature intends," then the jig is up. If Nature has intent, then nature is a Being.

Returning to the "who" that many of us agree doesn't belong in the classroom, you can argue that Darwin's theory does in fact presume to answer that question by postulating that no "who" was ever involved. That is a belief, a religious position, as it were, that science cannot test.

The scientists and editorialists now publicly chuckling over the Booboisie's opposition to a century's worth of science are also clucking over the failure of American citizens in general to embrace evolution. A 2004 Gallup poll found that, after decades of an evolution-only educational diet, 38 percent of us believe God directed evolution and 45 percent rejected the theory completely in favor of biblical creation.

We remain stubbornly opposed to a theory that has been fed to us as unassailable fact, because we perceive that the theory long ago overstepped the bounds of science to become a religion itself. And science as a creed is breathtakingly inadequate. That's why I'm so unconcerned by the outcome of this second Scopes trial: We live our lives in the "why's" that Darwin's heirs cannot answer, and we know it.