Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, has a piece in The Boston Globe blasting the idea — peddled by President Bush last week — that “intelligent design” should be taught alongside evolution in America’s classrooms. Not all political conservatives, she notes, are willing to “make science classrooms a platform for pseudoscience whose sole intent is to counter ‘godless’ natural selection.” Take, for example, columnist Charles Krauthammer or blogger Glenn Reynolds — or even the White House’s own science czar, John H. Marburger III (director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), who stated earlier this year that “intelligent design is not a scientific theory.”

It’s puzzling why certain religious groups find the theory of evolution so threatening. Yes, it doesn’t bode too well for the sanctity of your convictions if you believe every word in an ancient book to be literally true. But even if you recognize the validity of evolution, there is still plenty of space for thinking what you want about the existence, or non-existence, of God. As Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, points out, the idea behind “intelligent design” — that a higher power had a hand in the development of species on earth — is “not even a scientifically answerable question.”

The theory of evolution doesn’t deny the existence of God. In fact, we expect too much of science if we insist that it can disprove, or prove, the presence of the sacred. So why bother at all with teaching pseudoscience? Let’s teach what we actually know — and let kids decide for themselves if they see God in evolution, or just the ordinary magic of the cosmos.

On this point, it seems, many conservatives and liberals would agree.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen