The Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City was one of 22 local groups and scientists last summer that helped draft a position paper that supported the teaching of evolution and urged public school teachers to "encourage students to discuss any seeming conflicts (about evolution) with their parents or religious leaders."

Even though the Buttars bill mentions neither intelligent design nor the Bible, some observers think it was motivated by religious concerns. "If you look at State Board of Education minutes from last summer, Buttars made comments like 'my religion doesn't believe that we descended from apes,' " said Carol Lear, director of school law and legislation for the Utah Office of Education. "I don't know how he can disavow his religious motives."

Lear points to a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Wallace v. Jaffee, in which the court struck down an Alabama law requiring a "minute of meditation or voluntary prayer" at the start of each school day. The court ruled that the law violated the First Amendment because the sponsors of the law had religious motives.

As for Buttars, he told the Senate Education Standing Committee Tuesday, "There is no faith-based in here. They're all inferring that. . . . All the bill says is, don't overstate what you don't know" about the origins of life.

The problem most theistic evolutionists have with intelligent design, or ID, says BYU biology professor Jeffery, is that ID wants to find "evidences" of divine existence in nature, whereas theistic evolutionists "don't feel any necessity to find complicated things that look nice to try to prove divine existence." Once the proponents of ID have identified that something is the "product of design," they don't do further research on the subject, Jeffery objects. "It simply is not science," he said.

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