Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?

There have been many tumultuous arguments, especially in the south, about the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools alongside evolution in science classes. This would be all good and fine if ID was indeed a scientific theory, but many, including me, claim that it is simply religion in the guise of science, invented to replace "creationism" as the word used while talking about the creation of life by God. Herein lies the key to this argument: Is Intelligent Design religion or science? Is it a scientific theory or a religious one? Does it have a place in our classrooms?Edited by Organicmachination, : No reason given.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

I honestly don't know how people like N_J can continue to argue that ID is not religion in disguise.Let me repeat this. The ID text book Of Pandas and People started out as a text book for creationism. The earlier versions of this book specifically refered to creationism and creationist. When they realized that they couldn't sell this book with the words creationism and creaitonist, they went back, highlighted all the words "creationism" and "creationist" and changed them to "intelligent design" and "design proponent". At one point, they only highlighted a portion of a word "creationist" and they ended up with the word "cdesign proponentist".In other words, intelligent design is just creationism with a change of name. It's like me legally changing my name to George Bush and expect people to believe I'm now a republican.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

ID is just Creationism with a new name and a botched face lift. It is not disguised as science because it does not even resemble science. It is a warped caricature of science. ID has no theory that can make predictions or be tested. The whole purpose behind ID is to attack a bogus definition of the Theory of Evolution. You cannot use ID to carry out scientific inquiry.The only useful place it has in the classroom is as an example of pseudo-science.

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

"Intelligent design 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." --- Phillip Johnson"Intelligent design is just the logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." --- William DembskiIf they don't know, who does?

Intelligent Design is not religion in the guise of science. The term is self-explanatory and does not imply God or religion.Hijacking a self-explanatory term is different from inventing a new concept. "Do creationists use Intelligent Design to disguise their beliefs?", is a separate question.The investigation of whether nature has developed through design seems a scientific enough one to me.Whether it should be proposed in 'our' classrooms is a political question which I wouldn't comment on, not being from your country.

But Intelligent Design invokes an "Intelligent Designer". If this "Intelligent Designer" is not God, what else could it be? Even if such an entity is not the God of the Bible or any other of our human Gods, is it not inherently religious because it invokes a God-like creator, one that not only created our Earth, but our entire universe?

Don't you find it odd that cdesign proponentists continue to outright deny that the designer could have been aliens or zeus or the unicorn? Instead, when they are cornered cdesign proponentists always say the designer is the god of abraham.Again, I must point to the ID text book Of Pandas and People. The previous versions of the book were written for creationism. They simply highlighted the words "creationism" and "creationist" and changed them to "intelligent design" and "design proponent" after they realized they couldn't sell this book because of the law.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

sinequanon What f'ing bullshit. All the term Intelligent Design does is hand wave away the problem of explanation for the universe. If the universe is intelligently designed we are then left with the question of where that intelligence arose from and now the answer is left wanting once again.Intelligent Design is a non answer for people whose credulity allows for no questioning.

Teleology is not religion in the guise of science. Intelligent Design however is a movement that advances a theological argument that relies on obfuscating science.Occasionally, ID people will run back to simple teleology - but examining things closely (looking at Pandas and People, the Wedge document etc) reveals that the cdesign proponentists are not just championing teleology.Intelligent Design is a specific movement which uses distortion and lying about science to advance their agenda.
Teleology is an interesting philosophical argument, with possible implications in the study of nature (science).If there was enough time to study the philosophy of science, perhaps teleology should come up. High School curriculum is already jam packed, but I learned about teleology at university without issue.

The intelligent designer/designers may be no different from the laws of nature. Both are intended to determine what shall be.Not knowing where the laws of nature came from has not caused science to throw them out. Why should the concept of intelligent design be any different?

There is evidence that the laws of nature exist. There is no evidence of a designer.It really is that simple.

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If the intelligent designer is simply the laws of nature, then evolution exists, doesn't it, and your ID theory is blown out of the water. Playing semantics isn't going to work here. You should know that we all know that ID is simply a method to get religion into schools.

You have one of the most common misconception about the so-called "laws of nature".There are no laws of nature. What there are are a set of behaviors by the universe that we can observe. We then invent/create a set of "laws" or mathematical constructs to attempt to explain these behaviors. It's like trying to throw in a best fit curve in your data.Any freshman college student could have told you this. Even the laws that we have created/invented to describe the natural phenomena are subject to modification and change as new data and new behaviors are observed.Please try to stop treating science like a religious dogma. It's not. There's no such thing as "truth" in science. All, and I do mean ALL, things in science are subject to modification, change, and even completely thrown out the window. It's not like the religion of intelligent design where no matter what the evidence shows cdesign proponentists continue to believe in fairies.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Wouldn't a simple way to deal with this be to say, "if your theory is called intelligent design, then we will discuss intelligence and we will discuss design but we will not discuss theology"?Throwing the whole thing out looks like a convenient way of avoiding challenging questions about evolution.