Gerald L. Zelizer, "Where did we come from? (And what can we teach our kids?)" (2005)

• Evolution can be found in school curriculums across the USA, but not necessarily in classrooms, according to a story last week in The New York Times. School administrators and individual teachers avoid the controversial topic, even when it is part of the curriculum.

• The school board in Dover, Pa., late last year became the first in the nation to require teaching "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in high school biology. This hypothesis argues that some aspects of nature, such as the workings of the eye, depend on so many parts functioning together that they could not have evolved slowly through gradual Darwinian steps, but only through the design of a higher intelligence. Other school districts across the country are debating whether to follow suit.

In early January, Dover's science teachers refused to read a required statement that Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact."

• A court in Cobb County, Ga., told its school board in January to remove a sticker with a similar disavowal of evolution from its new biology textbook as an intrusion of religion into science curriculum.

Some states, such as Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, Mississippi and Oklahoma, refrain from using the word "evolution" altogether in their state science standards.

Planted in the shadow of this conflict is the seed of an older argument: whether science and religion are compatible. Advocates on both sides should relax. Intelligent design and evolution can cohabit the same schools; and science and religion can cohabit the same planet.

What's needed: Open minds

This cozy compatibility, however, works only if proponents of both views take a fresh look at their own assumptions, those of their adversaries and the precise role of science and religion.

The arguments of anti-evolutionists have themselves evolved. Initially, they insisted on creationism, the notion that the origin of the world was literally as the Book of Genesis proclaims. But, after the Supreme Court in 1987 struck down a Louisiana law that required teaching creationism alongside evolution, other approaches, including eventually the more subtle intelligent design theory, ripened.

Among its most prominent spokespeople are scientists such as Michael Behe of Lehigh University, who point out major flaws in Darwin's theory of a continuous evolutionary chain from a few original forms. For example, many of the necessary transitional fossils that would link ancient forms to their contemporary ancestors are missing. Therefore, only design (or God) and not evolution could create the intricate diversity of life, he says.

Others, though, such as Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University, co-author with science writer Joseph Levine of the most widely used high school biology text, counter that as in all human history, gaps occur until information is found to fill them.

Lost in the smoke of these battling theories are some shared and overlooked commonalities between evolution and intelligent design. In both, life emanates from the sea. In both, the composition of human beings shares much with the dust of the Earth. In both, the end result is a human species capable of contemplating its own life and death and making moral choices. In both, creation of forms also results from a process and not exclusively from a sudden event.

Miller, a Catholic, who also authored Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, goes even further. When asked whether he, a biologist, believes in God, he answers: "I believe in Darwin's God." As he sees it, evolution may not diminish religion, but instead add material texture to what is often abstract and ethereal.

Science or religion?

Yet, the gaps between the theories of evolution and intelligent design overwhelm any overlap. Evolution makes specific propositions that are testable, provable and disprovable through a measurable and observable process that takes place in nature. That categorizes it as science. Intelligent design, on the other hand, cannot be proved or disproved by natural evidence because its design is supernatural. That categorizes it as religion.

Despite the disagreements, purists on both sides of this debate should understand that science and religion needn't be at each other's throats. They supplement one another. Science explains how the world is. Religion explains why the world is. Science explains material processes. Religion attributes meaning to those processes.

Can intelligent design and evolution reside in the same school building? Yes. In the same curriculum? No. Intelligent design belongs in history or social science class. Evolution belongs in science class.

Religion can speak with its own authentic voice, as can science. But neither needs a voice-over from the other.

Gerald L. Zelizer, rabbi of Neve Shalom, a Conservative congregation in New Jersey, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.