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Who Has Designs on Your Students’ Minds?

The intelligent-design movement is a small but growing force on U.S. university campuses. For some it bridges the gap between science and faith, for others it goes beyond the pale Geoff Brumfiel meets the movement’s vanguard. -- Geoff Brumfiel

For a cold Tuesday night in March, the turnout is surprisingly good. Twenty or so fresh-faced college students are gathered together in a room in the student union at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, the state’s largest public university. They are there for the first meeting of Salvador Cordova's Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) clubs.

I have a great deal of respect for the scientific method. Cordova tells his attentive audience as he outlines the case for intelligent design. Broadly speaking, he says, the concept is that a divine hand has shaped the course of evolution. The arguments are familiar ones to advocates and opponents of the idea: some biological systems are too complex, periodic explosion in the fossil record too large, and differences between species too great to be explained by natural selection alone. Cordova - who holds three degrees from the university. The most recent one in mathematics -- argues that the development of life on Earth would be described better if an intelligent creator is added to the mix.

Most scientists overwhelmingly reject the concept of intelligent design. “To me it doesn't deserve any attention, because it doesn’t make any sense,” says Bruce Alberts, a microbiologist and president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Its proponents say that scientific knowledge is incomplete and that there’s no way to bridge the gap except for an intelligent designer, which is sort of saying that science should stop trying to find explanations for things.”

But despite researchers' apparent lack of interest, or perhaps because of it, the movement is catching on among students on U.S. university campuses. Much of the interest can be traced to U.S. teenagers, more than three-quarters of whom believe, before they reach university, that God played some part in the origin of humans. But others are drawn to the idea out of sheer curiosity.