While visiting friends in Bend recently, I had the opportunity to read the exchange on ”intelligent design” appearing in The Bulletin. We of Shasta County, Calif., normally feel that our county seat, Redding, is a country cousin to the more sophisticated, growing and economically vital city of Bend. The arguments put forward for intelligent design and against evolution have caused some of us to rethink our second-best status.

Proponents of intelligent design put forward two arguments for teaching ID in science classrooms. One argument is that ID, too, is a science. The other argument is that ID and evolution are both belief systems and should be taught together.

Science is not a belief system; it deals little, if any, with metaphysical questions. Science has the same metaphysical foundations as has automotive mechanics, very little in either case.

Science deals with the mechanics of how things happen. Evolution deals with how change happens through time. Biological evolution deals with how species change through time. The purposes of a designer are simply not in the realm of science.

There is a school of thought in phi- losophy called logical positivism. The logical positivists say that there is no knowledge other than that generated by logical reasoning coupled with empirical evidence. They reject other questions and answers as meaningless.

Science, as it is practiced in all fields, does not go as far as the philosophers of logical positivism. Scientists do not argue that science is the only source of knowledge. Indeed, they almost never worry about this question, and there is about the same proportion of church members among scientists as the general population. They do insist that the only scientific knowledge is that knowledge which is testable. Testable means that we can imagine the kind of empirical evidence that would reject or refute an idea if it is, indeed, wrong.

This refutability criterion is the all-important distinction between what is, and what is not, science. If you put forward a proposition that cannot conceivably be refuted by evidence, then you’ve not put forward a scientific proposition. Stories not meant to be tested Rudyard Kipling called ”just so stories.”

The criterion for what is science is accepted worldwide by working scientists. And, by this criterion, intelligent design is not science. ID is a belief or credo not subject to disproof by physical evidence. Its proponents argue that some biological structures are so complex that they cannot imagine how these could have arisen by the normal mechanisms involved in biological evolution. Therefore, they must be evidence of intelligent design.

The supposition that biological structures arose as a result of supernatural intervention, whether called special creation or intelligent design, cannot be tested. It is a proposition that cannot possibly be refuted with evidence. Such assertions stand as a religious creed, and it will be a tragedy if this is taught in the public schools as science.

You might note that ID is also a revival of a very old theology called provi-dentialism. Providentialism argues that all the natural systems work together to produce the world we know, and this is evidence of divine providence. In the comic version of this view, it is said, ”Isn’t it providential that we have ears? Otherwise our glasses would keep falling off our faces.”

There is a small problem with cause and effect in the preceding statement. There is a large problem with cause and effect in all the arguments for intelligent design. The only causes in ID are the assumed purposes of an unnamed designer and therefore forever beyond the reach of scientific testing.

Can ID proponents, with a straight face, call this science? Of course not. And if it’s not science, why do they want it in a science classroom? There are some obvious reasons, but, as they say in the math text books, this is left to the reader to work out for himself.