Someday, John Calvert says, science might make a better case for evolution than “intelligent design” as an explanation for the origins of life. And if that day comes, he’ll accept it.

But not yet.

“It may be that today the evidence is compelling for design but tomorrow it won’t be, from a scientific standpoint,” said Calvert, president of Intelligent Design Network Inc. “That’s the only way to approach it; you can’t let the implications of the evidence affect your official conclusions.”

Peter Gegenheimer, a molecular bioscientist at Kansas University, doesn’t buy it. Intelligent design proponents, he said, already have their conclusion — that a godlike designer created life — and won’t be swayed.

“The bottom line is that intelligent design meets all the classical definitions of a pseudoscience,” said Gegenheimer, a board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.

This is where Kansas’ long-running battle over evolution arrived last week. The discussion is no longer focused on whether to include evolution in science education standards, but whether intelligent design also should be taught.

Calvert, who has emerged as adviser to a faction of the state committee working on science standards, is at the center of the battle. And while evolution has been hashed out back-and-forth repeatedly in Kansas during the past five years, intelligent design hasn’t received the same sort of public scrutiny.

Not creationism?

The origins of the intelligent design movement go back at least to 1982, when a federal judge ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas law that required the teaching of “creation science.” The use of supernatural explanations for scientific phenomena was officially taken out of the classroom.

Calvert, a longtime lawyer for the Lathrop and Gage law firm in Overland Park, said the ruling was correct.

“The courts said this (creationism) is science that essentially seeks to validate the Genesis account,” Calvert said, referring to the story of creation in the Bible. “This is really religious, a situation where somebody is trying to promote a religious view through a scientific field, and that’s not appropriate.”

Intelligent design, he said, is different. For one thing, it uses scientific methods to deduce the existence of a designer — the same type of methods, Calvert said, used to ascertain whether artifacts found in ruins were made by humans or just random stones.

For another, it doesn’t promote any particular religion. It doesn’t even assert the designer is necessarily supernatural.

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“From a scientific standpoint, we don’t know who the designer is, and whether the designer is an alien the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program is looking for, or maybe even a god of some unexplainable account,” Calvert said. “That is a religious question. That’s not one a scientist can answer.”

The argument

The argument for intelligent design, as presented by Calvert, is three-pronged.

• The existence of patterns. Organisms, Calvert said, are full of patterns — like the structure of DNA — that imply design.

“You will not find messages in a salt crystal or a rock or a river,” said Calvert, who has an undergraduate geology degree. “But you will find messages in DNA, and the messages have a very significant function.”

Gegenheimer disagrees. “Pattern doesn’t imply design,” he said.

“At its core, that argument is saying ‘I can’t imagine how that (pattern) happened, so it’s not possible'” without design, Gegenheimer said. “That’s not a good argument.”

• Statistics. “What is the probability of that first sequence coming together by chance?” Calvert said. “We don’t have the time, but if you run the calculations, the answer is completely off the charts. It’s essentially way beyond the realm of statistical possibility.”

There’s no way to know this, Gegenheimer said.

“You cannot measure the probability of something happening unless you know how it happened,” he said. “A statistical claim isn’t meaningful, because there’s no way to estimate what the probabilities are, what they ought to be.”

• “Irreducible complexity.” Proponents say some life systems are so complex they cannot have evolved from a less-sophisticated version that couldn’t have worked.

This is the theory championed in what is perhaps the touchstone text for the intelligent design movement — “Darwin’s Black Box,” by Michael Behe, a biology professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

Complexity, Gegenheimer countered, doesn’t imply a supernatural cause.

“You can build an arch with a scaffold,” responds Gegenheimer. “But when you take the scaffold away it looks like there’s no way to build it.”

Familiar issues

There’s a lot of time for the debate to play out.

The Kansas State Board of Education will receive a new draft of science standards in February, and a final draft in the summer. By then, conservative board members amenable to intelligent design will hold six of the board’s 10 seats.

In the meantime, the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit last week against a Pennsylvania school district that requires students to learn about intelligent design, claiming the curriculum violates separation of church and state.

Calvert co-founded the Intelligent Design Network in 1999, the last time evolution emerged as a statewide issue. Now 64, he said he took early retirement from his law practice to devote time to the matter; the network now has a mailing list “into the thousands” with branches in New Mexico and Minnesota. Those branches are directed by a mechanical engineer and a software engineer, respectively.

William Harris, a nutritional biochemist on the faculty at the University of Missouri Kansas City, is the only scientist listed as a “director” on the network’s Web site. And the term “intelligent design” was reputedly coined in 1991 by Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor, in his book “Darwin on Trial.”

Calvert, though, said the minority who favor intelligent design have unfairly been frozen out of the mainstream scientific community.

Marketplace of ideas

“Modern science is not objective,” he said. “It is just flat not objective.”

Calvert said he just wanted a chance to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Kansas educators, he said, are obligated to be fair.

“It’s inappropriate for the state to suppress evidence of design and support a naturalistic world view that supports nontheistic belief systems,” Calvert said.

Gegenheimer disagreed, suggesting that intelligent design is an unsubtle way of bringing God back into the classroom.

“The problem is, with any of this (intelligent design) reasoning, you have to accept supernatural causation to begin with,” he said.

Scientists, he said, have reached a consensus in favor of evolution. Intelligent design proponents stand outside that consensus.

“If you want knowledge that’s universal, it’s got to be limited to what everybody can see,” Gegenheimer said, adding: “Angels may be real, but not everybody can see them or measure them.”