The Opinion pieces by Adrian Melott and Mano Singham make clear the scientific and philosophical problems with the intelligent design movement and with attempts to insert ID into public-school science curricula. Moreover, the ideas of ID proponents are also in conflict with the views of many theologians who are engaged in dialogue between science and religion.

The notion that science should invoke supernatural causes to explain currently puzzling phenomena such as the origin of life is popular but theologically naïve. Discussions of divine action by participants in today’s science–theology dialogue 1 are generally in accord with the dictum of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian hanged by the Nazis in 1945: “We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.” 2 God is active in the world through the natural processes that science studies. This is not an entirely modern idea. In Genesis 1, God is pictured as commanding the earth and the waters to bring forth living things. Many teachers of the early church understood that to mean that God had given the materials of the world the ability produce life when God willed it. 3  

The contents of science curricula must, of course, be argued for on scientific grounds. But those engaged in public debates about science education would do well to realize that ID proponents are out of touch with mainstream work at the science–theology interface.

1.
See, for example,
I. G.
Barbour
,
Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues
,
HarperSanFrancisco
,
San Francisco, Calif.
(
1997
);
N.
Murphy
,
G. F. R.
Ellis
,
On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics
,
Fortress Press
,
Minneapolis, Minn.
(
1996
);
J.
Polkinghorne
,
Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World
,
New Science Library
,
Boston
, (
1989
).
2.
D.
Bonhoeffer
,
Letters and Papers from Prison
, enlarged ed.,
Eberhard
Bethge
, ed.,
Macmillan
,
New York
(
1972
), p.
311
.
3.
E.
Messenger
,
Evolution and Theology
,
Macmillan
,
New York
(
1932
).