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Yesterday America, today the world

As these examples from around the world show, the debate over creation, evolution and religion is rapidly going global. Until recently, all the hottest public arguments had taken place in the United States, where school boards in many districts and states tried to restrict the teaching of Darwin's idea that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.

Darwin-bashers in America suffered a body-blow in December 2005, when a judge\ufffdstriking down the policies of a district school board in Pennsylvania\ufffddelivered a 139-page verdict that delved deeply into questions about the origin of life and tore apart the case made by the \ufffdintelligent design\ufffd camp: the idea that some features of the natural world can be explained only by the direct intervention of a ingenious creator.

Intelligent design, the judge found, was a religious theory, not a scientific one\ufffdand its teaching in schools violated the constitution, which bars the establishment of any religion. One point advanced in favour of intelligent design\ufffdthe \ufffdirreducible complexity\ufffd of some living things\ufffdwas purportedly scientific, but it was not well-founded, the judge ruled. Proponents of intelligent design were also dishonest in saying that where there were gaps in evolutionary theory, their own view was the only alternative, according to the judge.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the American campaign to counter-balance the teaching of evolution, artfully distanced itself from the Pennsylvania case, saying the local school board had gone too far in mixing intelligent design with a more overtly religious doctrine of \ufffdcreationism\ufffd. But the verdict made it much harder for school boards in other parts of America to mandate curbs on the teaching of evolution, as many have tried to do\ufffdto the horror of most professional scientists.

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Even in the United States, defenders of evolution teaching do not see their battle as won. There was widespread dismay in their ranks in February when John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, accepted an invitation (albeit to talk about geopolitics, not science) from the Discovery Institute. And some opponents of intelligent design are still recovering from their shock at reading in the New York Times a commentary written, partly at the prompting of the Discovery Institute, by the pope's close friend, Cardinal Christoph Sch\ufffdnborn, the Archbishop of Vienna.

In his July 2005 article the cardinal seemed to challenge what most scientists would see as axiomatic\ufffdthe idea that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the diversity and complexity of life in all its forms. Within days, the pope and his advisers found they had new interlocutors. Lawrence Krauss, an American physicist in the front-line of courtroom battles over education, fired off a letter to the Vatican urging a clarification. An agnostic Jew who insists that evolution neither disproves nor affirms any particular faith, Mr Krauss recruited as co-signatories two American biologists who were also devout Catholics. Around the same time, another Catholic voice was raised in support of evolution, that of Father George Coyne, a Jesuit astronomer who until last year was head of the Vatican observatory in Rome. Mr Krauss reckons his missive helped to nudge the Catholic authorities into clarifying their view and insisting that they did still accept natural selection as a scientific theory.

But that was not the end of the story. Catholic physicists, biologists and astronomers (like Father Coyne) insisted that there was no reason to revise their view that intelligent design is bad science. And they expressed concern (as the Christian philosopher Augustine did in the 4th century) that if the Christian church teaches things about the physical world which are manifestly false, then everything else the church teaches might be discredited too. But there is also a feeling among Pope Benedict's senior advisers that in rejecting intelligent design as it is understood in America they must not go too far in endorsing the idea that Darwinian evolution says all that needs to be, or can be, said about how the world came to be.

The net result has been the emergence of two distinct camps among the Catholic pundits who aspire to influence the pope. In one there are people such as Father Coyne, who believe (like the agnostic Mr Krauss) that physics and metaphysics can and should be separated. From his new base at a parish in North Carolina, Father Coyne insists strongly on the integrity of science\ufffd\ufffdnatural phenomena have natural causes\ufffd\ufffdand he is as firm as any secular biologist in asserting that every year the theory of evolution is consolidated with fresh evidence.

In the second camp are those, including some high up in the Vatican bureaucracy, who feel that Catholic scientists like Father Coyne have gone too far in accepting the world-view of their secular colleagues. This camp stresses that Darwinian science should not seduce people into believing that man evolved purely as the result of a process of random selection. While rejecting American-style intelligent design, some authoritative Catholic thinkers claim to see God's hand in \ufffdconvergence\ufffd: the apparent fact that, as they put it, similar processes and structures are present in organisms that have evolved separately.

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