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A couple years ago at a Christian publishing convention, I was talking trends with an astute industry veteran. We happened to be standing near a table on which several books relating to evolution and Intelligent Design (ID) were arrayed. "Well," my friend said with a dismissive backhand wave, "at least that seems to be just about played out."

My friend was guilty of wishful thinking. Like many Christian intellectuals, he was weary of the evolution debate, which had seemed not so long ago to have settled down to a low murmur. Then Phillip Johnson and his crowd of ID troublemakers came along, challenging the Darwinian establishment head-on (couldn't they have been less confrontational about it?), and then there was a flurry of school cases (mostly in Bible Belt regions), and before you knew what hit you it was starting all over again, like an embarrassing family episode brought to light. (For an account of the rise of ID and its salient arguments, see Edward Larson's review of Thomas Woodward's Doubts About Darwin on p. 89 of this issue.)

At the moment, at least, there are no signs that the debate is cooling down—on the contrary. And there is a good deal to celebrate in that. In particular, the ID movement has performed an invaluable service in highlighting the way in which much Darwinian thinking rests on philosophical assumptions that have no scientific warrant. At the same time, the aggressive ID attacks on Christian scientists who have not rejected evolutionary theory lock, stock, and barrel—"accommodationists," as they are called in ID literature, where they are treated rather like collaborationists with the Nazis during World War II—have pushed theistic evolutionists to formulate their own views more cogently. And of course the attention garnered by the ID movement has also provoked a vigorous range of responses from hardcore Darwinians that are often inadvertently revealing—especially of the extraordinary arrogance that still infests the field—but which also at times score telling points against ID weaknesses.

In short, there is real engagement (see for example the just-published volume, Debating Design, from Cambridge University Press, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse). And yet for all that, the state of the debate is deeply unsatisfactory, often obscuring more than it clarifies. Certainly the fiercely anti-Christian wing of the Darwinian establishment—headed by Richard Dawkins, who has just been named Britain's #1 public intellectual in a widely publicized poll conducted by Prospect magazine—bears the greatest responsibility for this murkiness. (It was Dawkins who notoriously wrote in his bestseller The Blind Watchmaker: "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane—or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that." There is a good deal of this ritual strutting in the Darwinist camp.)

But Christian participants in the evolution debate are guilty as well. What's needed most right now is a step back from the fray, a reorienting. What follows are some suggestions for that next stage.

Let's begin with the admirably concise opening question from the old Baltimore Catechism, on which generations of Catholics were nurtured: "Who made me?" The answer minced no words: "God made me." Protestants and indeed all Christians, whether or not they practice formal catechesis, will readily agree. God made us; God made our world; God made the unimaginably vast universe in which our world is but a speck.

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September 2004, Vol. 48, No. 9