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Part of a series on Intelligent design Watchmaker analogy Concepts Irreducible complexity Specified complexity Fine-tuned universe Intelligent designer Theistic science Neo-creationism Movement Timeline Wedge strategy Politics Kitzmiller v. Dover Campaigns Discovery Institute campaigns "Teach the controversy" Authors Jonathan Wells William A. Dembski Phillip E. Johnson Michael Behe Stephen C. Meyer Organisations Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture Centre for Intelligent Design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity Truth in Science Reactions Jewish Roman Catholic Scientific bodies that explicitly reject intelligent design Creationism Category v t e

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Intelligent design is an argument for the existence of God, based on the premise that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its leading proponents, all of whom are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, claim that intelligent design is a scientific theory that stands on equal footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding the evolution and origin of life.

The scientific community states unequivocally that intelligent design is not science; many scientists and at least one major organization of science teachers have also termed it pseudoscience, and some have termed it junk science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), a United States federal court ruled that a public school district requirement for science classes to teach that intelligent design is an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. United States District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature. During the trial, intelligent design advocate Michael Behe testified under oath that no scientific evidence in support of the intelligent design hypothesis has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Overview

Intelligent design (ID) is presented as an alternative to natural explanations for the development of life. It stands in opposition to conventional biological science, which relies on the scientific method to explain life through observable processes such as mutation and natural selection. However, intelligent design has no scientific evidence published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or similar to support it.

The stated purpose of intelligent design is to investigate whether or not existing empirical evidence implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. William A. Dembski, one of intelligent design's leading proponents, has stated that the fundamental claim of intelligent design is that "there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence." In a leaked Discovery Institute memo, commonly known as the Wedge Document, however, the supporters of the movement were told, "We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of what they term "signs of intelligence": physical properties of an object that point to a designer (see: teleological argument). For example, if an archeologist finds a statue made of stone in a field, he may, ID proponents argue, justifiably conclude that the statue was designed and then reasonably seek to identify the statue's designer. He would not, however, be justified in making the same claim if he found an irregularly shaped boulder of the same size. Design proponents argue that living systems show great complexity, from which they infer that some aspects of life have been designed.

Intelligent design proponents say that although evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected. Dembski, in Signs of Intelligence, states: "Proponents of intelligent design regard it as a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes. Note that intelligent design studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se." In his view, one cannot test for the identity of influences exterior to a closed system from within, so questions concerning the identity of a designer fall outside the realm of the concept. However, no rigorous test that can identify these effects has yet been proposed.

According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as "so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them". Although some polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls have been criticized as suffering from considerable flaws, such as having a low response rate (248 out of 16,000), being conducted on behalf of an organization with an expressed interest in the outcome of the poll, and containing leading questions.

Origins of the concept

Philosophers have long debated whether the complexity of nature indicates the existence of a purposeful natural or supernatural designer/creator. The first recorded arguments for a natural designer come from Greek philosophy. In the 4th century BC, Plato posited a natural "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. Aristotle also developed the idea of a natural creator of the cosmos, often called the "Prime Mover," in his work Metaphysics. In De Natura Deorum, or "On the Nature of the Gods" (45 BC), Cicero stated that "the divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature."

The use of this line of reasoning as applied to a supernatural designer has come to be known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. The most notable forms of this argument were expressed in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, design being the fifth of Aquinas' five proofs for God's existence, and by William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802). Paley used the watchmaker analogy, which is still used in intelligent design arguments. In the early 19th century, such arguments led to the development of what was called natural theology, the study of biology as a search to understand "the mind of God." This movement fueled the passion for collecting fossils and other biological specimens that ultimately led to Darwin's theory of the origin of species. Similar reasoning postulating a divine designer is embraced today by many believers in theistic evolution, who consider modern science and the theory of evolution to be fully compatible with the concept of a supernatural designer.

Intelligent design in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern development of natural theology which seeks to change the basis of science and undermine evolution theory. As evolutionary theory has expanded to explain more phenomena, the examples that are held up as evidence of design have changed. But the essential argument remains the same: complex systems imply a designer. Examples offered in the past included the eye (optical system) and the feathered wing; current examples are mostly biochemical: protein functions, blood clotting, and bacterial flagella (see irreducible complexity).

The earliest known version of the particular line of reasoning that would come to be called "intelligent design" began, according to Dr Barbara Forrest, "in the early 1980s with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origin (MoLO 1984) by creationist chemist Charles B. Thaxton with Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen. Thaxton worked for Jon A. Buell at the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Texas, a religious organization that published MoLO."

Intelligent design deliberately does not try to identify or name the specific agent of creation — it merely states that one (or more) must exist. Although intelligent design itself does not name the designer, the personal view of many proponents is that the designer is the Christian god. Whether this was a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from the teaching of science has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case.

Origins of the term

Though unrelated to the current use of the term, the phrase "intelligent design" can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American and in an 1850 book by Patrick Edward Dove. The term is also used in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Paleyite botanist George James Allman:

No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible—in heredity and in adaptability, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design.

The term can be found again in Humanism, a 1903 book by one of the founders of classical pragmatism, F.C.S. Schiller: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design." A derivative of the term appears in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) in the article on the Telological argument for the existence of God : "Stated most succinctly, runs: The world exhibits teleological order (design, adaptation). Therefore, it was produced by an intelligent designer." The term "intelligent design" was also used in the early 1980s by Sir Fred Hoyle as part of his promotion of panspermia.

The predominant modern use of the term began after the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), ruled that creationism is unconstitutional in public school science curricula. Stephen C. Meyer, cofounder of the Discovery Institute and vice president of the Center for Science and Culture, reports that the term came up in 1988 at a conference he attended in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA. He attributes the phrase to Charles Thaxton, editor of Of Pandas and People. In drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, the word 'creationism' was subsequently changed, almost without exception, to intelligent design. The book was published in 1989 and is considered to be the first intelligent design book. The term was promoted more broadly by the retired legal scholar Phillip E. Johnson following his 1991 book Darwin on Trial, which advocated redefining science to allow claims of supernatural creation. Johnson, considered the "father" of the intelligent design movement, went on to work with Meyer, becoming the program advisor of the Center for Science and Culture in forming and executing the wedge strategy.

Concepts

Irreducible complexity

In the context of intelligent design, irreducible complexity was put forth by Michael Behe, who defines it as "a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to illustrate this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces — the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer — all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. Removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is present only when all parts are assembled. Behe's original examples of alleged irreducibly complex biological mechanisms instead include the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.

Critics point out that the irreducible complexity argument assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary and therefore could not have been added sequentially. They argue that something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary as other components change. Furthermore, they argue, evolution often proceeds by altering preexisting parts or by removing them from a system, rather than by adding them. This is sometimes called the "scaffolding objection" by an analogy with scaffolding, which can support an "irreducibly complex" building until it is complete and able to stand on its own. Behe himself has since confessed to "sloppy prose," and that his "argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof." Irreducible complexity has remained a popular argument among advocates of intelligent design; however, in the Dover trial, the court held that "Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large."

Specified complexity

The intelligent design concept of "specified complexity" was developed by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. Dembski states that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and specified, simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. He provides the following examples: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified." He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the "patterns" of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA.

Dembski defines complex specified information as anything with a less than 1 in 10 chance of occurring by (natural) chance. Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: Complex specified information (CSI) cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature.

The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument is strongly disputed by the scientific community. Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields as Dembski asserts. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions. Richard Dawkins, another critic of intelligent design, argues in The God Delusion that allowing for an intelligent designer to account for unlikely complexity only postpones the problem, as such a designer would need to be at least as complex

Fine-tuned universe

Intelligent design proponents also raise occasional arguments outside biology, most notably an argument based on the anthropic principle that the universe is "fine-tuned," an argument that claims that the many features that make life possible cannot be attributed to chance. These include the values of fundamental physical constants, the strength of nuclear forces, electromagnetism, electron-neutron mass ratios and gravity, as well as a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the thermodynamic concept of entropy. Intelligent design proponent and Center for Science and Culture fellow Guillermo Gonzalez argues that if any of these values were even slightly different, the universe would be dramatically different, with many chemical elements and features of the universe like galaxies being impossible to form. Thus, proponents argue, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome. Scientists almost unanimously have responded that this argument cannot be tested and is not scientifically productive. Some scientists argue that even when taken as mere speculation, these arguments are poorly supported by existing evidence.

Critics of both intelligent design and the weak form of the anthropic principle argue that they are essentially a tautology; in their view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the universe is able to support life. The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible. Life as we know it might not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place. A number of critics also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected and that calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable.

Intelligent designer

Intelligent design arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid identifying the intelligent agent they posit. Although they do not state that God is the designer, the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only a god could intervene. Though Dembski in The Design Inference speculates that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements, the authoritative description of intelligent design explicitly states that the universe displays features of having been designed. Acknowledging the paradox, Dembski concludes that "no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life." The leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian god, to the exclusion of all other religions.

Beyond the debate over whether intelligent design is scientific, a number of critics go so far as to argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely, irrespective of its status in the world of science. For example, Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, asks why a designer would "give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes" and why he or she would not "stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species." Coyne also points to the fact that "the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different" as evidence that species were not placed there by a designer. Previously, in Darwin's Black Box, Behe had argued that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives, so such questions cannot be answered definitively. Odd designs could, for example, "have been placed there by the designer... for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason." Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, "either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved."

Asserting the need for a designer of complexity also raises the question "What designed the designer?" Intelligent design proponents say that the question is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design. Richard Wein counters that the unanswered questions a theory creates "must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer." Dawkins sees the claim that the designer does not need to be explained, not as a contribution to knowledge, but as a thought-terminating cliché. In the absence of observable, measurable evidence, the very question "What designed the designer?" leads to an infinite regression from which intelligent design proponents can only escape by resorting to religious creationism or logical contradiction.

Movement

The intelligent design movement arose out of an organized neocreationist campaign directed by the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes employing intelligent design arguments in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science should not be limited to naturalism and should not demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out of hand any explanation which contains a supernatural cause. The overall goal of the movement is to "defeat materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept. All leading intelligent design proponents are fellows or staff of the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture. Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of the Discovery Institute, which guides the movement and follows its wedge strategy while conducting its adjunct Teach the Controversy campaign.

Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. In statements directed at the general public, they say intelligent design is not religious; when addressing conservative Christian supporters, they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible. Recognizing the need for support, the institute affirms its Christian, evangelistic orientation: "Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."

Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute's obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious world-view that undergirds it."

Religion and leading proponents

Although intelligent design's arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer, most of the principal intelligent design advocates are evangelical Christians who have stated that in their view the "designer" is God. Phillip E. Johnson, William Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, are Protestants, Michael Behe is Roman Catholic, and Jonathan Wells, another principal advocate, is a member of the Unification Church, headed by Reverend Sun-Myung Moon. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments which are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message." Johnson emphasizes that "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion"; "after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact ... only then can 'biblical issues' be discussed."

The strategy of deliberately disguising the religious intent of intelligent design has been described by William Dembski in The Design Inference. In this work Demski' lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options for the identity of the designer; however, in his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, Dembski states that "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." Dembski also stated, "ID is part of God's general revelation Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ." Both Johnson and Dembski cite the Bible's Gospel of John as the foundation of intelligent design.

Barbara Forrest contends that such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, not merely a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide.

Controversy

A key strategy of the intelligent design movement is convincing the general public that there is a debate among scientists about whether life evolved, in order to convince the public, politicians and cultural leaders that schools should "teach the controversy." However, there is no such debate within the scientific community; the scientific consensus is that life evolved. Intelligent design is widely viewed as a stalking horse for its proponents' campaign against what they say is the materialist foundation of science, which they argue leaves no room for the possibility of God.

The intelligent design controversy centers on three issues:

1. Can intelligent design be defined as science?
2. If so, does the evidence support it and related explanations of the history of life on Earth?
3. If the answer to either question is negative, is the teaching of such explanations appropriate and legal in public education, specifically in science classes?

Natural science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation alone (sometimes called empirical science). Intelligent design proponents seek to change this definition by eliminating "methodological naturalism" from science and replacing it with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, calls "theistic realism", and what critics call "methodological supernaturalism," which means belief in a transcendent, nonnatural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, nonnatural deity. Intelligent design proponents argue that naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive explanation for the origins of life and the universe. Proponents say that evidence exists in the forms of irreducible complexity and specified complexity that cannot be explained by natural processes.

Supporters also hold that religious neutrality requires the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design in schools, saying that teaching only evolution unfairly discriminates against those holding creationist beliefs. Teaching both, they argue, allows for the possibility of religious belief, without causing the state to actually promote such beliefs. Many intelligent design followers believe that "Scientism" is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase theism from public life, and they view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres. Some allege that this larger debate is often the subtext for arguments made over intelligent design, though others note that intelligent design serves as an effective proxy for the religious beliefs of prominent intelligent design proponents in their efforts to advance their religious point of view within society.

According to critics, intelligent design has not presented a credible scientific case and is an attempt to teach religion in public schools, which the United States Constitution forbids under the Establishment Clause. They allege that intelligent design has substituted public support for scientific research. Furthermore, if one were to take the proponents of "equal time for all theories" at their word, there would be no logical limit to the number of potential "theories" to be taught in the public school system, including intelligent design parodies like the Flying Spaghetti Monster "theory." There are innumerable mutually incompatible supernatural explanations for complexity, and intelligent design does not provide a mechanism for discriminating among them. Furthermore, intelligent design is neither observable nor repeatable, which critics argue violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability. Indeed, intelligent design proponent Michael Behe concedes "You can't prove intelligent design by experiment."

Though evolution theory does not seek to explain abiogenesis, the generation of life from nonliving matter, intelligent design proponents cannot infer that an intelligent designer is behind the part of the process that is not understood scientifically, since they have not shown that anything supernatural has occurred. The inference that an intelligent designer (a god or an alien life force) created life on Earth has been compared to the a priori claim that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids. In both cases, the effect of this outside intelligence is not repeatable, observable or falsifiable, and it violates the principle of parsimony. From a strictly empirical standpoint, one may list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques, but one must admit ignorance about exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Although intelligent design proponents aim to gain support by unifying the religious world — Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who believe in a creator — in challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative theory, mainstream religious denominations have responded by expressing support for evolution. They state that their religious faith is fully compatible with science, which is limited to dealing only with the natural world; a position described by the term theistic evolution. As well as pointing out that intelligent design is not science, they also reject it for various philosophical and theological reasons. The arguments of intelligent design have been directly challenged by over 10,000 clergy signing the Clergy Letter Project. Prominent scientists who strongly express religious faith, such as the astronomer George Coyne and the biologist Ken Miller, have been at the forefront of opposition to intelligent design. While creationist organizations have welcomed intelligent design's support against naturalism, they have also been critical of its refusal to identify the designer, and have pointed to previous failures of the same argument.

Defining intelligent design as science

The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge of the natural world without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural, an approach sometimes called methodological naturalism. Intelligent design proponents believe that this can be equated to materialist metaphysical naturalism and have often said that not only is their own position scientific, but it is even more scientific than evolution, and that they want a redefinition of science as a revived natural theology or natural philosophy to allow "non-naturalistic theories such as intelligent design." This presents a demarcation problem, which in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science. For a theory to qualify as scientific, it must be:

• Consistent (internally and externally)
• Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations, see Occam's Razor)
• Useful (describes, explains and predicts observable phenomena)
• Empirically testable and falsifiable (see Falsifiability)
• Based on multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
• Correctable and dynamic (changes are made as new data are discovered)
• Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more)
• Provisional or tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty)

For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, but ideally all, of these criteria. The fewer criteria are met, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a few or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, tentative or progressive.

In light of its apparent failure to adhere to scientific standards, in September 2005, 38 Nobel laureates issued a statement saying "Intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent." And in October 2005 a coalition representing more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers issued a statement saying "intelligent design is not science" and called on "all schools not to teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science, because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory."

Critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the criteria for scientific evidence used by most courts, the Daubert Standard. The Daubert Standard governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. The four Daubert criteria are:

• The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified.
• The methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• There should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating the results.
• The methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community.

In deciding Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District on December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that "we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

Peer review

The failure to follow the procedures of scientific discourse and the failure to submit work to the scientific community which withstands scrutiny have weighed against intelligent design's being considered valid science. To date, the intelligent design movement has yet to have an article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data and which require explanations to be based on empirical evidence. Dembski, Behe and other intelligent design proponents say bias by the scientific community is to blame for the failure of their research to be published. Intelligent design proponents believe that their writings are rejected for not conforming to purely naturalistic, nonsupernatural mechanisms rather than because their research is not up to "journal standards" and that the merit of their articles is overlooked. Some scientists describe this claim as a conspiracy theory. The issue that the supernatural explanations do not conform to the scientific method became a sticking point for intelligent design proponents in the 1990s and is addressed in the wedge strategy as an aspect of science that must be challenged before intelligent design could be accepted by the broader scientific community.

The debate over whether intelligent design produces new research, as any scientific field must, and has legitimately attempted to publish this research, is extremely heated. Both critics and advocates point to numerous examples to make their case. For instance, the Templeton Foundation, a former funder of the Discovery Institute and a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that it asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, but none were ever submitted. Charles L. Harper Jr., foundation vice-president, said: "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review."

The only article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that made a case for intelligent design was quickly withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal's peer-review standards. Written by the Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture Director Stephen C. Meyer, it appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in August 2004. The article was literature review, which means that it did not present any new research but, rather, culled quotations and claims from other papers to argue that the Cambrian explosion could not have happened by natural processes. The choice of venue for this article was also considered problematic, because it was so outside the normal subject matter (see Sternberg peer review controversy). Dembski has written that "perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." In a 2001 interview, Dembski said that he stopped submitting to peer-reviewed journals because of their slow time-to-print and that he makes more money from publishing books.

In the Dover trial, the judge found that intelligent design features no scientific research or testing. There, intelligent design proponents cited just one paper, on simulation modeling of evolution by Behe and Snoke, which mentioned neither irreducible complexity nor intelligent design and which Behe admitted did not rule out known evolutionary mechanisms. But in sworn testimony, Behe said: "There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." As summarized by the judge, Behe conceded that there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting his claims of intelligent design or irreducible complexity. In his ruling, the judge wrote: "A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory."

Despite this, the Discovery Institute continues to insist that a number of intelligent design articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including in their list the two articles mentioned above. Critics, largely members of the scientific community, reject this claim, pointing out that no established scientific journal has yet published an intelligent design article. Instead, intelligent design proponents have set up their own journals with "peer review" which lack impartiality and rigor, consisting entirely of intelligent design supporters.

Intelligence as an observable quality

The phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus definition. William Dembski, for example, has written that "Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature." The characteristics of intelligence are assumed by intelligent design proponents to be observable without specifying what the criteria for the measurement of intelligence should be. Dembski, instead, asserts that "in special sciences ranging from forensics to archaeology to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), appeal to a designing intelligence is indispensable." How this appeal is made and what this implies as to the definition of intelligence are topics left largely unaddressed. Seth Shostak, a researcher with the SETI Institute, refuted Dembski's comparison of SETI and intelligent design, saying that intelligent design advocates base their inference of design on complexity — the argument being that some biological systems are too complex to have been made by natural processes — while SETI researchers are looking primarily for artificiality.

Critics say that the design detection methods proposed by intelligent design proponents are radically different from conventional design detection, undermining the key elements that make it possible as legitimate science. Intelligent design proponents, they say, are proposing both searching for a designer without knowing anything about that designer's abilities, parameters, or intentions (which scientists do know when searching for the results of human intelligence), as well as denying the very distinction between natural/artificial design that allows scientists to compare complex designed artifacts against the background of the sorts of complexity found in nature.

As a means of criticism, certain skeptics have pointed to a challenge of intelligent design derived from the study of artificial intelligence. The criticism is a counter to intelligent design claims about what makes a design intelligent, specifically that "no preprogrammed device can be truly intelligent, that intelligence is irreducible to natural processes." This claim is similar in type to an assumption of Cartesian dualism that posits a strict separation between "mind" and the material universe. However, in studies of artificial intelligence, while there is an implicit assumption that supposed "intelligence" or creativity of a computer program is determined by the capabilities given to it by the computer programmer, artificial intelligence need not be bound to an inflexible system of rules. Rather, if a computer program can access randomness as a function, this effectively allows for a flexible, creative, and adaptive intelligence. Evolutionary algorithms, a subfield of machine learning (itself a subfield of artificial intelligence), have been used to mathematically demonstrate that randomness and selection can be used to "evolve" complex, highly adapted structures that are not explicitly designed by a programmer. Evolutionary algorithms use the Darwinian metaphor of random mutation, selection and the survival of the fittest to solve diverse mathematical and scientific problems that are usually not solvable using conventional methods. Furthermore, forays into such areas as quantum computing seem to indicate that real probabilistic functions may be available in the future. Intelligence derived from randomness is essentially indistinguishable from the "innate" intelligence associated with biological organisms, and poses a challenge to the intelligent design conception that intelligence itself necessarily requires a designer. Cognitive science continues to investigate the nature of intelligence along these lines of inquiry. The intelligent design community, for the most part, relies on the assumption that intelligence is readily apparent as a fundamental and basic property of complex systems.

Arguments from ignorance

Eugenie Scott, along with Glenn Branch and other critics, has argued that many points raised by intelligent design proponents are arguments from ignorance. In the argument from ignorance, a lack of evidence for one view is erroneously argued to constitute proof of the correctness of another view. Scott and Branch say that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance because it relies upon a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: lacking a natural explanation for certain specific aspects of evolution, we assume intelligent cause. They contend most scientists would reply that the unexplained is not unexplainable, and that "we don't know yet" is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside of science. Particularly, Michael Behe's demands for ever more detailed explanations of the historical evolution of molecular systems seem to assume a false dichotomy where either evolution or design is the proper explanation, and any perceived failure of evolution becomes a victory for design. In scientific terms, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" for naturalistic explanations of observed traits of living organisms. Scott and Branch also contend that the supposedly novel contributions proposed by intelligent design proponents have not served as the basis for any productive scientific research.

Intelligent design has also been characterized as a "god of the gaps" argument, which has the following form:

• There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
• The gap is filled with acts of God (or Intelligent designer) and therefore proves the existence of God (or Intelligent designer).

A god of the gaps argument is the theological version of an argument from ignorance. A key feature of this type of argument is that it merely answers outstanding questions with explanations (often supernatural) that are unverifiable and ultimately themselves subject to unanswerable questions.

Improbable versus impossible events

William Dembski formulated the universal probability bound, a reformulation of the creationist argument from improbability, which he argues is the smallest probability of anything occurring in the universe over all time at the maximum possible rate. This value, 1 in 10, represents a revision of his original formula, which set the value of the universal probability bound at 1 in 10. In 2005 Dembski again revised his definition to be the inverse of the product of two different quantities, 10 and the variable rank complexity of the event under consideration.

In "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences," John Allen Paulos states that the apparent improbability of a given scenario cannot necessarily be taken as an indication that this scenario is more unlikely than any other potential one: "Rarity by itself shouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion . Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable."

International status of Intelligent Design

UK

In the United Kingdom, public education includes Religious Education as a compulsory subject, and many "faith schools" that teach the ethos of particular denominations. When it was revealed that a group called Truth in Science had distributed DVDs (produced in America) featuring figures linked to the DI, and claimed they were being used by 59 schools, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) stated that "Neither creationism nor intelligent design are taught as a subject in schools, and are not specified in the science curriculum" (part of the National Curriculum which does not apply to independent schools or to Education in Scotland). The DfES subsequently stated that "Intelligent design is not a recognised scientific theory; therefore, it is not included in the science curriculum... Intelligent design can be explored in religious education as part of developing an understanding of different beliefs. It is up to the local SACREs (standing advisory councils on religious education) to set the syllabus for how this should be done. The department is currently working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to communicate this message to schools."

Australia

The status of intelligent design is somewhat similar in Australia, where religious education occurs in public schools. When the Federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, raised the notion of ID being taught in science classes, the public outcry caused the minister to quickly concede that the correct forum for ID, if it were to be taught, is in religious or philosophy classes.

Other nations

Intelligent design has received little support outside of the U.S., U.K, and Australia. Plans by Dutch Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven to "stimulate an academic debate" on the subject in 2005 caused a severe public backlash. After the 2007 elections she was succeeded by Ronald Plasterk, described as a "molecular geneticist, staunch atheist and opponent of intelligent design." It also received support from the Roman Catholic Cardinal, Christoph Schoenborn, though others in the Catholic Church strongly oppose it. While creationism has strong political clout in many Islamic countries, Intelligent design has not been adapted to Islam, with creationists there instead partnering with the Institute for Creation Research.

See also

Notes and references

1. "ID is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God. He traced this argument back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer." (Known as the teleological argument) Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, December, 2005
2. ^ Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture. Questions about Intelligent Design: What is the theory of intelligent design? "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
   • Primer: Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA)
   • Intelligent Design Intelligent Design network.
3. "Q. Has the Discovery Institute been a leader in the intelligent design movement? A. Yes, the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Q. And are almost all of the individuals who are involved with the intelligent design movement associated with the Discovery Institute? A. All of the leaders are, yes." Barbara Forrest, 2005, testifying in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. Kitzmiller Dove Testimony, Barbara Forrest
   • "The Discovery Institute is the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country." Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive Jodi Wilgoren. The New York Times, August 21 2005.
   • Who is behind the ID movement? Frequently Asked Questions About "Intelligent Design", American Civil Liberties Union.
   • "Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank established in 1991. The institute, which promotes a conservative public-policy agenda, has occupied a lead role in the ID movement recently, most notably through its Center for Science and Culture, which boasts a number of leading ID proponents among its fellows and advisers." The Evolution of George Gilder Joseph P. Kahn. The Boston Globe, July 27 2005.
   • "Who's Who of Intelligent Design Proponents," Science & Religion Guide Science and Theology News. November 2005. (PDF file)
4. ^ Intelligent Design and Peer Review American Association for the Advancement of Science.
5. "The engine behind the ID movement is the Discovery Institute." Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action Journal of Clinical Investigation 116:1134–1138 (2006). doi:10.1172/JCI28449. A publication of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
6. Stephen C. Meyer, 2005. Ignatius Press. The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories. See also Darwin's Black Box.
7. See: 1) List of scientific societies rejecting intelligent design 2) Kitzmiller v. Dover page 83. 3) The Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism petition begun in 2001 has been signed by "over 600 scientists" as of August 20, 2006. A four day A Scientific Support for Darwinism petition gained 7733 signatories from scientists opposing ID. The AAAS, the largest association of scientists in the U.S., has 120,000 members, and firmly rejects ID. More than 70,000 Australian scientists and educators condemn teaching of intelligent design in school science classes. List of statements from scientific professional organizations on the status intelligent design and other forms of creationism.
8. "for most members of the mainstream scientific community, ID is not a scientific theory, but a creationist pseudoscience." Trojan Horse or Legitimate Science: Deconstructing the Debate over Intelligent Design David Mu. Harvard Science Review, Volume 19, Issue 1, Fall 2005.
   • National Science Teachers Association, a professional association of 55,000 science teachers and administrators in a 2005 press release: "We stand with the nation's leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr. John Marburger, the president's top science advisor, in stating that intelligent design is not science.…It is simply not fair to present pseudoscience to students in the science classroom." National Science Teachers Association Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush National Science Teachers Association Press Release August 3 2005
   • Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action Journal of Clinical Investigation 116:1134–1138 American Society for Clinical Investigation, 2006.
9. "Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design's arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science." H. Allen Orr. Annals of Science. New Yorker May 2005.Devolution—Why intelligent design isn't.
   • Also, Robert T. Pennock Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism.
   • Junk science Mark Bergin. World Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 8 February 25 2006.
10. National Academy of Sciences, 1999 Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition
11. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Case No. 04cv2688. December 20 2005
12. ^ Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science
    Pieret, John, The Quote Mine Project: Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines, TalkOrigins Archive. (A response to a criticism of Jones' decision) Cite error: The named reference "kitzruling_pg88" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
13. Dembski. The Design Revolution. pg. 27 2004
14. ^ Though intelligent design proponents say publicly the purpose of ID is to search for design, they've stated a very different goal to their constituency: "We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." The Wedge Strategy Discovery Institute, Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. 1998 (PDF file) That the stated purpose of intelligent design is merely a scientific pretense covering a religious agenda is widely believed: "members of the national ID movement insist that their attacks on evolution aren’t religiously motivated, but, rather, scientific in nature." ... "Yet the express strategic objectives of the Discovery Institute; the writings, careers, and affiliations of ID’s leading proponents; and the movement’s funding sources all betray a clear moral and religious agenda." Inferior Design Chris Mooney. The American Prospect, August 10 2005 and "ID's rejection of naturalism in any form logically entails its appeal to the only alternative, supernaturalism, as a putatively scientific explanation for natural phenomena. This makes ID a religious belief." Expert Witness Report Barbara Forrest Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, April 2005. (PDF file)
15. "...the ID movement has not proposed a scientific means of testing its claims..." AAAS Board Resolution on Intelligent Design Theory American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002.
16. Kitzmiller v. Dover page 70, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, December 2005. page 70
17. Nearly Two-thirds of U.S. Adults Believe Human Beings Were Created by God The Harris Poll #52, July 6 2005.
18. Mooney, Chris (2003-09-11). "Polling for ID". Doubt and About. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
19. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Latin Library.
20. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. "Thomas Aquinas' 'Five Ways'" in faithnet.org.uk. He framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.
21. William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 1809, London, Twelfth Edition.
22. Dr Barbara Forrest. Know Your Creationists: Know Your Allies
23. ^ Dembski: "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4: July/August, 1999
24. ^ Phillip Johnson: "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." Johnson 2004. Christianity.ca. Let's Be Intelligent About Darwin. "This isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." Johnson 1996. World Magazine. Witnesses For The Prosecution. "So the question is: "How to win?" That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing"—the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do." Johnson 2000. Touchstone magazine. Berkeley's Radical An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson
25. Dove, Patrick Edward, The theory of human progression, and natural probability of a reign of justice. London, Johnstone & Hunter, 1850. LC 08031381 "Intelligence-Intelligent Design."
26. 'The British Association', The Times, Saturday, 20 September 1873; pg. 10; col A.
27. 'Evolution according to Hoyle: Survivors of disaster in an earlier world', By Nicholas Timmins, The Times, Wednesday, 13 January 1982; pg. 22; Issue 61130; col F.
28. William Safire. The New York Times. August 21 2005.On Language: Neo-Creo
29. National Association of Biology Teachers. A Reader's Guide to Of Pandas and People National Center for Science Education. Of Pandas and People, the foundational work of the Intelligent Design movement
30. "Although science has made great progress by limiting itself to explaining only through natural causes, Johnson would have us allow the occasional supernatural intervention for those phenomena that cause problems for his particular theology. Though he has no objection to natural explanations for how fluids pass through a cell membrane, we need to leave room for a "whimsical creator" (p. 31) or God’s "inscrutable purpose" (p. 71) to explain the origin of life or the origin of complex body plans. Confusing unsolved with unsolveable, he wishes us to stop seeking natural causes for these phenomena. Johnson wishes to take us back to an earlier, less scientifically productive time when science had to wait for religious approval before daring to explain something that was religiously sensitive." Darwin On Trial: A Review by Eugenie C. Scott. NCSE
31. Behe, Michael (1997): Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference
32. Irreducible complexity of these examples is disputed; see Kitzmiller, pp. 76–78, and Ken Miller Webcast
33. The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity" Kenneth R. Miller Brown University
34. John H. McDonald's "reducibly complex mousetrap"
35. David Ussery, "A Biochemist's Response to 'The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution'"
36. For example, Bridgham et al.showed that gradual evolutionary mechanisms can produce complex protein-protein interaction systems from simpler precursors. Bridgham; et al. (2006). "Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation". Science. 312 (5770): 97–101. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)
37. Orr, H. Allen (2005-05-30). "Devolution". The New Yorker. This article draws from the following exchange of letters in which Behe admits to sloppy prose and non-logical proof: Behe, M. (2003-03-26). "Has Darwin met his match? Letters - An exchange over ID" (HTML). Discovery Institute. Retrieved 2006-11-30. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
38. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, page 64
39. Dembski. Intelligent Design, p. 47
40. Nowak quoted. Claudia Wallis. Time Magazine, 15 August 2005 edition, page 32 Evolution Wars
41. John S. Wilkins and Wesley R. Elsberry. Biology and Philosophy, 16: 711–724. 2001. The Advantages of Theft over Toil: The Design Inference and Arguing from Ignorance
42. Richard Dawkins (2006). The God Delusion. ISBN 0-618-68000-4.
43. Sewell, Granville (2005-12-28). "Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure". The American Spectator. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
44. Entropy, Disorder and Life
45. Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure
46. Guillermo Gonzalez (2004). The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. ISBN 0-89526-065-4.
47. The Panda's Thumb. review of The Privileged Planet
48. Is The Universe Fine-Tuned For Us? Victor J. Stenger. University of Colorado. (PDF file)
49. The Anthropic Principle Victor J. Stenger. University of Colorado. (PDF file)
50. Our place in the Multiverse Joseph Silk. Nature, Volume 443 Number 7108, September 14 2006.
51. See, e.g., Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro, "A Puddlian Fable" in Huchingson, Religion and the Natural Sciences (1993), pp. 220–221
52. "The theory of Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Discovery Institute. What is Intelligent Design? Questions About Intelligent Design
53. Dembski. The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence
54. Jerry Coyne. The New Republic, August 22 2005. The Case Against Intelligent Design
55. Jerry Coyne: “The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Case Against Intelligent Design” in The New Republic, Aug 22 & 29, 2005 issue, p. 21-33. Available at http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050822&s=coyne082205
56. Dr. Donald E. Simanek. Intelligent Design: The Glass is Empty
57. IDEA "One need not fully understand the origin or identity of the designer to determine that an object was designed. Thus, this question is essentially irrelevant to intelligent design theory, which merely seeks to detect if an object was designed... Intelligent design theory cannot address the identity or origin of the designer - it is a philosophical / religious question that lies outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Christianity postulates the religious answer to this question that the designer is God who by definition is eternally existent and has no origin. There is no logical philosophical impossibility with this being the case (akin to Aristotle's 'unmoved mover') as a religious answer to the origin of the designer..." FAQ: Who designed the designer? FAQ: Who designed the designer?
58. Richard Wein. 2002. Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates
59. ^ Who Designed the Designer? Jason Rosenhouse. Creation & Intelligent Design Watch, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
60. Richard Dawkins. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design pg 141
61. See, e.g., Joseph Manson, "Intelligent design is pseudoscience", UCLA Today Vol. 26. No.2 Sept. 27, 2005. ; Rev Max, "The Incredibly Strange Story of Intelligent Design", New Dawn Magazine No. 97 (July-August 2006)
62. "The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a 'wedge' that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the 'thin edge of the wedge,' was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." Wedge Document Discovery Institute, 1999. (PDF file)
63. ^ Wedge Document Discovery Institute, 1999.
64. ^ "I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science."..."Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?"..."I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves." Johnson 1999. Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won
65. Discovery Institute fellows and staff. Center for Science and Culture fellows and staff.
66. Barbara Forrest. 2001. "The Wedge at Work: Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics
67. Phillip Johnson. Keeping the Darwinists Honest, an interview with Phillip Johnson. Citizen Magazine. April 1999. "Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement, and the Wedge strategy stops working when we are seen as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message. ... The evangelists do what they do very well, and I hope our work opens up for them some doors that have been closed."
68. Phillip Johnson. Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. July/August 1999."...the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. ...This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact." The Wedge
69. ^ William Dembski, 1998. The Design Inference.
70. Dembski, 1999. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." p. 210
71. Dembski. 2005. Intelligent Design's Contribution to the Debate Over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris.Reply to Henry Morris
72. Barbara Forrest. Expert Testimony. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial transcript, Day 6 (October 5) "What I am talking about is the essence of intelligent design, and the essence of it is theistic realism as defined by Professor Johnson. Now that stands on its own quite apart from what their motives are. I'm also talking about the definition of intelligent design by Dr. Dembski as the Logos theology of John's Gospel. That stands on its own." ... "Intelligent design, as it is understood by the proponents that we are discussing today, does involve a supernatural creator, and that is my objection. And I am objecting to it as they have defined it, as Professor Johnson has defined intelligent design, and as Dr. Dembski has defined intelligent design. And both of those are basically religious. They involve the supernatural."
73. Seattle Times. March 31 2005.Does Seattle group "teach controversy" or contribute to it?
74. National Association of Biology Teachers Statement on Teaching Evolution
75. IAP Statement on the Teaching of Evolution Joint statement issued by the national science academies of 67 countries, including the United Kingdom's Royal Society (PDF file)
76. From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society: 2006 Statement on the Teaching of Evolution (PDF file), AAAS Denounces Anti-Evolution Laws
77. Intelligent design a Trojan horse, says creationist Mark Coultan, Sydney Morning Herald November 27 2005
78. Intelligent Design: Creationism's Trojan Horse, A Conversation With Barbara Forrest Americans United for Separation of Church and State, February 2005
79. Barbara Forrest, 2000. "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection." In Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000), pp. 7–29.
80. Phillip E. Johnson. Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (InterVarsity Press, 1995), positions himself as a "theistic realist" against "methodological naturalism."
81. Phillip Johnson. "My colleagues and I speak of 'theistic realism'— or sometimes, 'mere creation' — as the defining concept of our movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology." Starting a Conversation about Evolution
82. Phillip E. Johnson, quoted. 2001. Teresa Watanabe. Los Angeles Times (Sunday Front page) March 25 2001. "We are taking an intuition most people have and making it a scientific and academic enterprise," Johnson said. In challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative theory, the professor, who is a Presbyterian, added, "We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator." Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator: Believers in 'intelligent design' try to redirect evolution disputes along intellectual lines
83. Joel Belz, 1996. World Magazine. Witnesses For The Prosecution
84. Phillip E. Johnson. American Family Radio. January 10 2003 "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." Let's Be Intelligent About Darwin
85. Jon Buell & Virginia Hearn (eds), 1992. Proceedings of a Symposium entitled: Darwinism: Scientific Inference of Philosophical Preference?" (PDF file)
86. Karl Giberson. Science & Theology News, December 5 2005 Intelligent design’s long march to nowhere
87. Claudia Wallis. Time Magazine, August 15 2005. page 32 Evolution Wars
88. Michael J. Murray, n.d. Natural Providence (or Design Trouble) (PDF file)
89. Dembski. What is the position of the NRCSE on the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to neo-Darwinian evolution in Nebraska schools?
90. Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator, Teresa Watanabe. Los Angeles Times (Sunday Front page) March 25, 2001
91. Cardinal Schönborn, who sees "purpose and design in the natural world", has "no difficulty... with the theory of evolution the borders of scientific theory." October 2005 Catechetical Lecture at St. Stephan's Cathedral, Vienna
92. The Creation/Evolution Continuumby Eugenie Scott, 2000
93. Science, Religion, and the Teaching of Evolution in Public School Science Classes (pdf), The National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy, Teaching Evolution, March 2006
94. INTELLIGENT DESIGN AS A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM, George L. Murphy, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH, 2002
95. Intelligent design: is it intelligent; is it Christian?, AiG, February 2006
96. More Than Intelligent Design by Hugh Ross
97. Harun Yahya – The "Intelligent Design" Distraction
98. AiG’s views on the Intelligent Design Movement by Carl Wieland, August 2002
99. Stephen C. Meyer, 2005. The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories
100. Intelligent design is generally internally consistent and logical only within the framework in which it operates. Criticisms are that this framework has at its foundation an unsupported, unjustified assumption: that complexity and improbability must entail design, but the identity and characteristics of the designer are not identified or quantified, nor need they be. The framework of intelligent design, because it rests on a unquantifiable and unverifiable assertion, has no defined boundaries except that complexity and improbability require design, and the designer need not be constrained by the laws of physics.
101. Intelligent design fails to pass Occam's razor. Adding entities (an intelligent agent, a designer) to the equation is not strictly necessary to explain events.
102. The designer is not falsifiable, since its existence is typically asserted without sufficient conditions to allow a falsifying observation. The designer being beyond the realm of the observable, claims about its existence can be neither supported nor undermined by observation, making intelligent design and the argument from design analytic a posteriori arguments.
103. That intelligent design is not empirically testable stems from the fact that it violates a basic premise of science, naturalism.
104. Intelligent design professes to offer an answer that does not need to be defined or explained, the intelligent agent, designer. By asserting a conclusion that cannot be accounted for scientifically, the designer, intelligent design cannot be sustained by any further explanation, and objections raised to those who accept intelligent design make little headway. Thus intelligent design is not a provisional assessment of data which can change when new information is discovered. Once it is claimed that a conclusion that need not be accounted for has been established, there is simply no possibility of future correction. The idea of the progressive growth of scientific ideas is required to explain previous data and any previously unexplainable data.
105. The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Nobel Laureates Initiative. Intelligent design cannot be tested as a scientific theory "because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent." Nobel Laureates Initiative (PDF file)
106. Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales. 20 October 2005. Intelligent Design is not Science - Scientists and teachers speak out
107. ^ Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science
108. John Hawks. The President and the teaching of evolution
109. Laurie Goodstein. The New York Times. December 4, 2005. Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker
110. Statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington regarding publication of a paper by Stephen Meyer
111. Dembski. Is Intelligent Design a Form of Natural Theology?
112. Beth McMurtrie. The Chronicle Of Higher Education. 2001. "Darwinism Under Attack
113. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, October 19 2005, AM session Kitzmiller Testimony, Behe
114. Discovery Institute. Peer-Reviewed, Peer-Edited, and other Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design (Annotated)
115. "With some of the claims for peer review, notably Campbell and Meyer (2003) and the e-journal PCID, the reviewers are themselves ardent supporters of intelligent design. The purpose of peer review is to expose errors, weaknesses, and significant omissions in fact and argument. That purpose is not served if the reviewers are uncritical." Index to Creationist Claims Mark Isaak, TalkOrigins archive 2006
116. "ID leaders know the benefits of submitting their work to independent review and have established at least two purportedly "peer-reviewed" journals for ID articles. However, one has languished for want of material and quietly ceased publication, while the other has a more overtly philosophical orientation. Both journals employ a weak standard of "peer review" that amounts to no more than vetting by the editorial board or society fellows." Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey (PDF file)
117. Dembski. Natural History magazine. April 2002. Intelligent Design?
118. Shostak. space.com "In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. ... If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality." SETI and Intelligent Design Seth Shostak. SETI Institute, December 2005.
119. "For human artifacts, we know the designer's identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer's abilities, needs, and desires. With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer's identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. Professor Behe's only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies." — Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, page 81
120. Taner Edis. Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, March/April 2001 issue. Darwin in Mind: Intelligent Design Meets Artificial Intelligence
121. Primer: Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell
122. ^ Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch. National Center for Science Education. September 10 2002. "Intelligent Design" Not Accepted by Most Scientists
123. See, e.g., Richard H. Bube, "Man Come Of Age: Bonhoeffer's Response To The God-Of-The-Gaps," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, volume 14 fall (1971), pages 203-220.
124. Jason Rosenhouse, (2001). How Anti-Evolutionists Abuse Mathematics The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 3–8.
125. William A. Dembski (2004). The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design
126. The rank complexity is Dembski's φ function, which ranks patterns in order of their descriptive complexity. See specified complexity.
127. Revealed: rise of creationism in UK schools – "PR packs spread controversial theory", James Randerson, The Guardian science correspondent, November 27, 2006, retrieved 2007-06-01
128. BBC News-Education-'Design' attack on school science
129. UK House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 01 Nov 2006
130. Lords Hansard text for 18 Dec 2006 retrieved 2007-06-01
131. "Intelligent design not science: experts"
132. Cabinet ministers announced (update), on www.dutchnews.nl Downloaded 18 February, 2007.]
133. Gledhill, Ruth, Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible, The Times, October 05, 2005.
134. Sheriff, Lucy, Intelligent design 'not science', says Vatican astronomer, The Register, 21st November 2005
135. Cloning Creationism in Turkey, Taner Edis, National Center for Science Education

External links

ID perspectives

• Access Research Network
• Design Inference: The website of William A. Dembski
• Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture (Hub of the intelligent design movement)
• EvolutionNews.org Discovery Institute website tracking media coverage of intelligent design.
• ID The Future A multiple contributor weblog by Discovery Institute fellows.
• Intelligent Design Network
• International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
• Is It Unscientific to Believe in God? — article on Jehovah's Witnesses Official Web Site
• Uncommon Descent William Dembski's blog
• ResearchID.org

Non-ID perspectives

• ACLU site on Intelligent Design
• Intelligent Design? special feature in the Natural History Magazine
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Design Arguments for the Existence of God
• National Center for Science Education articles and other resources about Intelligent Design
• Resolution from the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences Second Edition (1999)
• Talk Origins Archive (Archive of a UseNet discussion group)
• 139 page in-depth analysis of intelligent design, irreducible complexity, and the book "Of Pandas and People" by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District judge
• Kitzmiller: An Intelligent Ruling on 'Intelligent Design', JURIST
• ID and Creationism
• The Design Argument Elliot Sober, 2004.
• Short discussion on Natural Knowledge and Natural Design as a contrast to Intelligent Design by Richard Dawkins

Media articles

• Discovery's Creation An overview of the origin of the intelligent design movement. (Seattle Weekly)
• Intelligent Design Deja Vu What would "intelligent design" science classes look like? All we have to do is look inside some 19th-century textbooks. (Washington Post)
• How the media have covered ID (Columbia Journalism Review)
• Judge Rules Against Pa. Biology Curriculum (Associated Press)
• Banned in biology class: intelligent design (Christian Science Monitor)
• Devolution (The New Yorker)
• The Evolution Debate (The New York Times)
• Debating Evolution in the Classroom (NPR)
• Darwin Victorious (Time)
• Intelligent Design: Scientific Inquiry or Religious Indoctrination? (Justice Talking)
• Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom (New England Journal of Medicine)

• Intelligent design
• Neo-Creationism
• Pseudoscience
• Fringe subjects without critical scientific evaluation