Associated Press carried Richard Ostling's alert this week. The latest anti-evolution buzz-word is Intelligent Design. It's not a new concept.

Intelligent Design is generally credited to Phillip E. Johnson, a retired American law professor at Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley and author. He is an elder of the Presbyterian Church. It is promoted as a movement by Discovery Institute of Seattle, founded in 1990 by Bruce Chapman (former Republican State of Washington Secretary of State) and George Gilder, Libertarian and dot.com millionaire. It has been quite successful in getting school boards to insist that the controversy over creationism versus evolution is the only appropriate matter to be taught in science classes.

Among newer important supporters is Austria's Roman Catholic Cardinal Christoph Shoenborn, via a New York Times opinion article (and I can't help noting that, for Californians, Austria is not far away). It has generated considerable positive response. In August that newspaper did a series on the issue that included Jodi Wilgoren's "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive," and Laurie Goodstein's coverage of a poll showing that two-thirds of Americans believe creationism and evolution should be taught side-by-side.

Ostling points us to the National Center for Science Education, (420 Fourth Street, Oakland CA 94609, 510-601-7203), which is defending the teaching of evolution in science classes in the public schools. Their website suggests that, when we find ourselves in a discussion on the topic, we avoid the words belief, theory, and fact which tend to escalate opposition; and that we remember the controversy is not about whether God exists or whether God created the world. It is about teaching the changes in life forms that have come about over time.

While scientists accuse religious advocates of stepping outside their field, linguists, philosophers and religious thinkers believe some pronouncements on evolution do the same thing. For example, a statement by the National Association of Biology Teachers was drafted that defined evolution as "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process." Two distinguished scholars, philosopher Alvin Plantinga, and Huston Smith, a historian of world religions, convinced the association to drop the first two adjectives because these were theological assertions, not scientific ones.

It seems a sure thing that we'll see this again in the Supreme Court within our lifetimes.