The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is — marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. — from the Joseph Conrad short story, The Shadow Line

In order to understand why anti-evolutionism refuses to go away nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, we need to go deeper than the level of either scientific or political discourse. The issue is not primarily (nor, perhaps, has it ever been) whether evolution is good science. Good science is what good scientists say it is, and evolution has not been seriously in question for many decades. Nor is the issue the fact that evolution is a historical science, and the past cannot be observed directly.

The same is true of plate tectonics, but we do not see school boards placing stickers in Earth-science textbooks warning students that continental drift is "just a theory." Nor is the issue whether intelligent design, or ID, is science. ID is just the New Yorker cartoon of savages observing an erupting volcano and concluding that "the gods are angry."

It may be packaged in the latest jargon, but it is empty of scientific content.

The issue is the perceived philosophical implications of evolution — what it has to say about who we are. This is hard for many scientists to grasp. It is much easier for the lay public to recognize how profoundly subversive the idea of evolution can be.

Evolution's implications are, of course, troubling to conservative adherents of all three Abrahamic religions, but not only to them. They are troubling to many non-religious humanists who fear that such notions as truth and beauty have no meaning in a Darwinian world. They are troubling to many engineers and practical-minded people who find it impossible to visualize immensely complicated mechanisms that actually work without having been consciously designed. For those of us who "do" evolution, for whom Darwinian thinking is second nature, such resistance is hard to grasp.

Like almost everyone in the grip of an idea, we find evolution so compelling that to reject it seems like willful stupidity. Some of us retreat into stereotyping opponents of evolution as Bible-thumping yahoos. How could they possibly be rational, sensible, sensitive people?

The most honest anti-evolutionists are the ones, like a columnist in a local newspaper, who admit that the thought of being an animal or "rising from the slime" makes them uneasy. Call it human exceptionalism.

People want very much to believe that human life — their own life — has meaning: meaning in a sense that the lives of possums and pheasants and armadillos don't. The standard functionalist explanation of religion, however offensive to believers, does indeed apply.

We create a creator God in our image so we can claim we were made in His, and we gain comfort from the fancied resemblance. We embrace a theory of redemption and the afterlife because we see so little in this life that strikes us as just.

Facing life alone is more than many of us can bear.

Yet evolution seems to tell us that we are alone — terribly alone. Meaning exists only insofar as we create it: "if there is no God, everything is permitted." The need to deny evolution, for many people, is the need to defend our greatest hope against our greatest fear.

A federal judge named John Jones gave evolutionists a Christmas present in the Dover, Pa., case last month. We should not take it for more than it is. Please do read "Being Stalked by Intelligent Design" by Pat Shipman in the November/December issue of American Scientist; it is an excellent review of both the scientific and political issues.

But because most anti-evolutionists are neither Biblical literalists nor political opportunists, but rather ordinary fellow human beings confronting the Big Questions, no amount of judicial wisdom will make the issue go away. If we recognize where our opponents are coming from, we can begin to communicate with them.

We can begin to tell them that evolution is not an explanation of ultimate origins — it isn't — and that it is the enemy of faith only to the degree that it is defined as such. We can try to show them that while science by definition cannot and does not study the supernatural, we — like they — find life to be an enchanted state. At base, that is why we have devoted our lives to trying to understand it.

Meanwhile, we will continue to meet in courtrooms.

Arthur Shapiro is a professor of evolution and ecology.