I sat in on a fascinating conversation recently with a bunch of biologists as they debated the merits of Intelligent Design. ID—a theistic alternative to strict evolutionary teaching—has, you’ll recall, been much in the news in the wake of a Kansas School board’s decision to include it in a high school science curriculum, a decision then overturned in court.

You’ll be shocked to learn that Intelligent Design wasn’t popular with these evolutionary biologists. But once that newsflash had passed there was a ton said that was extraordinarily interesting. For instance, the biologist sitting next to me was horrified to report that something like sixty percent of Americans actually lobbied for teaching ID in schools even though only about two-thirds of these same people believed it to be true. Who were these yahoos?

I suggested that maybe they felt that scientists overstated their case. Maybe these folks felt that strict evolutionary teaching was being extrapolated into a “scientific” claim that God didn’t exist. Since these survey respondents believed in God even if they had doubts about Intelligent Design, they wanted theistic counterbalance in the classroom. Nonsense! was the reply. No responsible evolutionary biologist would ever say evolution meant God didn’t exist! Like Scotty on Star Trek, they were scientists, dammit, not philosophers! They understood what was in their domain and what wasn’t!

I mentioned that I’d spent two years as a campus chaplain at Caltech and that students of faith there were routinely mocked by professors. And that it did seem to me that, in the press at least, it would be quite reasonable to regard evolutionary biologists as being implacably hostile to faith, whatever the reality might be.

What’s your take? In 2006, do hardcore science and hardcore faith by definition need to be mortal enemies? Can we agree that both feel profoundly threatened by—and, in their different ways, profoundly contemptuous of—the other?

In this roundtable, once the differing proposals had been made, the first comment voiced struck me as so reasonable that one would assume it has no chance of being adopted. “It seems to me,” this evolutionary biologist said, “that, at present at least, Intelligent Design exists more to critique perceived overstatements of evolutionary biology than to forge new scientific ground on its own. Maybe ID will contribute in that way in the future. But for the moment I would be perfectly content to grant a footnote in every high school science textbook along these lines. ‘Evolution, like all scientific proposals, can’t yet explain everything in its domain. The current scientific consensus is that it’s well on its way to resolving these challenges. That said, many of the implications of an evolutionary worldview historically have best been addressed by people of faith. Of course, these implications are beyond the scope of any scientist, at least in his or her professional capacity. But now here’s our best take on the current scientific consensus.’”

This does an end-run on very real and—to me—very reasonable disagreements. For instance it’s not nothing, as was conceded in this conversation, that more than a century after Darwin we still can’t conclusively document any species evolving into another species, not a minor point in the evolutionary argument. But it does seem to me that this man has proposed a compelling cease-fire for the moment in what strikes me as a pointless and destructive war, that we can actually do a lot of good with footnotes. But perhaps we live in a footnote-free world.