President Bush has let it be known that he thinks "intelligent design" should be taught in schools, along with and as a balance to, the theory of evolution. Evidence of intelligent design would imply an intelligent designer, or God, as we Catholics call him.
But this intelligent designer must then have designed not just the sublime patterns and polymer fabric of a spider's web, the musical genius of a Palestrina or the star pattern of the Pleiades, but also halitosis, haemorrhoids and spina bifida. These things were once routinely accepted as the will of God. But once the revolution begun by Darwin had advanced a bit, most Christians found it morally easier and far more comfortable to leave God's will out of it, and ascribe the fine detail of life's glories and discomforts to the accidents of evolution by random mutation and natural selection. That way you didn't have to blame the Almighty directly for ingrowing toenails, a prolapsed anus or infection by Chagas disease. Such things became simply the downside of life's glorious upside.
But there was another reason why, after decades of debate, doubt and dissent, many Christians accepted and incorporated the theory of evolution into their cosmology: it was palpably true. It began to look true while Darwin was alive; it looked even better once Mendelian genetics were rediscovered; and it has looked increasingly convincing with each advance in the understanding of DNA. What is shocking about the intelligent design argument is that it isn't true and can hardly be honest. It looks, from a distance, like a cynical attempt to introduce a literal version of Biblical teaching into the American school curriculum, against the intention of America's own founding fathers and the US constitution. The chiefs of the American Geophysical Union and the American Astronomical Society have both written to Bush arguing that he is mistaken in believing that intelligent design is a scientific theory in the way that evolution, relativity and plate tectonics are scientific theories: because the last three are based on hypotheses that have survived extensive testing and verification, while intelligent design is not. How much more straightforward it would have been if the scientists had just said: "It's not science, it's not true, and it's not honest."
Atheism, like religion, is an act of faith: evidence for the existence of God may be entirely anecdotal, but evidence for His absence is even more tenuous. Christians brought up in the mainstream tradition knew several important things about the anecdotal evidence. One of these was that although the Scriptures were revered as divinely inspired, they were certainly written down, lost, edited, translated and interpreted by fallible humans. Holy Writ contained powerful truth, even though some things in the narrative might not be literally true. "The things that you're liable to read in the Bible: it ain't necessarily so," wrote George Gershwin in Porgy and Bess. But even if some parts of the story were not literally true, the important lessons stuck.
One of these was that there was a difference between the awkwardly right and comfortable wrong; between honesty and falsehood. One of the most telling books in the Christian canon - once found in many households - was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It is now famous as an example of literary allegory, but those of us who read it at a very early age thought Giant Despair and Apollyon were real, and that there really might be such places as Doubting Castle, and the Slough of Despond. Other characters are undoubtedly real: Madam Wanton and Lady Feigning, Lord Timeserver and Lord Turn-about, Obstinate and Pliable, Mr Standfast and Mr Valiant-for-Truth.
Right now, Washington looks more like Vanity Fair than the Celestial City. It may be full of people who see themselves as born-again believers and right-on fundamentalists, neo-conservatives and other avatars of moral robustness. They do not, however, look quite like the kind of Christians who might have listened to the sermon on the mount: the one that blessed the meek and the peacemakers. They are free to believe whatever they like: for the first 1,600 years of Christianity all Christians believed that God made the world in seven days, around about 6,000 years ago. That, however, has for the past 400 years been increasingly difficult to square with the evidence in every stone and every streambed.
Even so, some people manage to take the Bible literally, and call it faith. It is quite another thing to believe it, and call it science, which is what George Bush seems to be proposing. Scientists are not the only people who should be shocked.