Utah's non-war over evolution

BYU's Jeffery thinks Mormons misunderstand his church's take on evolution. In the foreword to "Evolution and Mormonism," he writes, "Many people believe that if we are the spirit children of God, then our physical bodies must be unique. They believe that if our bodies are in any way related to those of other animals, such a relationship is in some way degrading. We see a striking parallel between this belief and the medieval concept that if humans are the center of God's creation then Earth must be the center of the universe."

He also points to a 1910 statement from the church First Presidency in which divinely directed evolution was included as an apparently acceptable possibility for the origin of life.

Evolution, as described by Darwin, does not require a God or some other "designer." But it doesn't rule out God or another creator, either. Darwin himself, in "Origin of Species," wrote: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one. . . ." Darwin, who identified himself as an agnostic, added the phrase "by the Creator" in the second edition.

There are many pro-evolutionists, including many evolutionary biologists, who also believe that God had a hand in the process, Jeffery says. In 1996, Pope John Paul II delivered a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences saying that "fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis."

Utahns are almost evenly divided on the question of whether Darwin's theory is compatible with a belief in God: 44 percent of respondents in the Dan Jones Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll believe the two are compatible, 47 percent don't.

While discussions of God's possible role — either setting in motion the process of evolution, or creating humans from scratch — should take place, they don't belong in science class, says USOE curriculum director Moulding. "Religion is a very different way of knowing. It relies on faith." The science of evolution, on the other hand, "is a mechanism that explains the observed, empirical evidence," he says.

Creationists, who believe that the Bible, read literally, is an accurate description of how life began, have tried for years to include God in science class. The current attacks on the teaching of evolution add a new twist, an idea called "Intelligent Design."

Intelligent Design's most vocal and organized defenders are concentrated at Seattle's nonprofit Discovery Institute, which takes pains to separate the movement from not only Creationism but religion as a whole. When the Deseret Morning News first contacted the Institute, spokesperson Rob Crowther worried about an Intelligent Design story appearing in the newspaper's religion section.