One year after a Kansas Board of Education banned the study of evolutionary biology in its public schools, the latest clash between evolutionists and creationists—those who believe God created life—has erupted at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. At issue is the establishment of the new Michael Polanyi Center, which aims to be an “an active participant in the growing dialogue between science and religion.”

Critics say Baylor's president, Robert B. Sloan Jr., set up the program with no formal input from the faculty, and they are perturbed that it will be dominated by proponents of ‘intelligent design’, a theory that draws on physics, mathematics and philosophy to argue that living things are so complex, evolution could not have produced them. Thus, life had to have been the work of a higher power. The center's director, William Dembski, is one of the theory's chief proponents.

Unlike creation science, which holds that scientific evidence proves the Bible's creation story, ‘intelligent design’ stops short at giving God credit and shies away from biblical references. Still, some Baylor science faculty argue that ‘intelligent design’ is a fringe theory that doesn't have any real standing in the academic community. “We are mainstream scientists and we're concerned that the Polanyi center casts us as something than other than that,” says Charles Weaver, an associate professor of neuroscience and psychology.

“The directors of the center claim to be doing science; that is, they argue for introducing intelligent design into science as an explanatory category,” Robert Baird, chairman of the Faculty Senate, wrote in the senate's newsletter. “Yet the Center was created without consultation with colleagues in the sciences.”

Sloan rejected a 26–2 vote by the senate to dissolve the center, and instead is putting together a review committee to study the issues raised by faculty. In an official statement, Sloan says he rejects creation science and would never bar anyone at Baylor from teaching evolution. He does, however, believe that God created the world.

Baylor, which houses an Institute of Biomedical Studies in affiliation with Baylor College of Medicine, is the country's largest Baptist university. The school's commitment to the sciences includes plans for a new $60 million science building and $20 million in renovations to existing laboratories. The director of the biomedical institute, Darden Powers, who is also chairman of the physics department, says he supports the president's position on the Polanyi center but declined to comment further.

The clash comes at a time when an increasing number of universities are revisiting the uneasy relationship between religion and science. Programs range from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's decidedly pro-evolution “Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion,” to the three-year-old God and Computers course and lecture series at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the graduate school program at the Institute for Creation Research in southern California.