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Today we have a new perspective on fundamentalism and anti-evolutionism. They are still alive in America; they weren't slain in Dayton. And that was always part of the premise of Inherit the Wind and Six Days or Forever?: that the exposing of Bryan killed these movements. And it didn't.

You and Larry Witham revived James Leuba's 1914 and 1933 surveys of scientists to get a sense of how today's scientific community views belief in God. What are your findings?

Well, it was a curious task to have to repeat Leuba's question, because he had a very particular definition of God that may exclude many people. He was asking about belief in a traditional theistic God that would resonate with traditional Jews, Muslims, or Christians. There was a lot of talk back at the turn of the century that positivism and science were routing belief in God, and so he did a survey of both the rank-and-file scientists and the scientific elite—surveys that we were able to reproduce. Leuba found about 40 percent belief among the rank and file and much lower belief among elites, and that's exactly what we found.

As a historian, I was interested in Leuba's survey because it had been so important in the Scopes trial. William Jennings Bryan had made Leuba's findings the centerpiece of his anti-evolution crusade. Bryan's prime evidence against evolution was the high level of disbelief among scientists, so I was interested in the precise question as Leuba had framed it. And we found that the response was basically constant over time.

How do you explain the Phillip Johnson phenomenon and the emergence of intelligent design in the origins discussion?

I think Phil Johnson is a very articulate speaker and advocate. He is obviously a skilled lawyer, and he's raising popular concerns and questions in the sense that if you believe in a traditional Christian God --and it doesn't have to be a fundamentalist God—don't you believe that God could interfere in nature? And if you believe that God could interfere in nature, don't you believe that God did interfere in nature? And if God did interfere in nature, then how can you understand natural phenomena without at least considering God as the author of such phenomena? So his argument against philosophical naturalism in science, as he likes to put it, has an instinctive appeal to many Americans.

Does this line of reasoning appeal to you?

Johnson has got to bring scientists into the debate, and there has to be a controversy within the scientific community. There have to be scientists who start doing intelligent design as science. And I haven't yet seen that happen. But in the end, if Johnson and others in the intelligent-design movement are going to change science, it is going to have to be through scientists and not through the general public.

What would "intelligent design as science" look like?

That's for the scientists to decide. You can come up with wonderful definitions about what science is: it is a falsifiable enterprise and a set of shifting paradigms, et cetera. But I take the journeyman view that science is what scientists do and that scientists define their profession just as other people define their profession. So I think the key test for intelligent design will come if and when scientists start doing intelligent design.

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6