Intelligent Design in Public Discourse

Depending on one's perspective, intelligent design (ID) can be viewed as either the intrusion of a religiously driven pseudoscience on the successful scientific project of evolutionary theory or as an alternative theory of origins that promotes pluralistic thought and education. The public debates have been played out in an astonishing number of venues, including movies, speaking events, textbooks, books, bumper stickers, court cases, museum exhibits, and media coverage of all of these. In this entry, we will try to outline the argumentative and discursive strategies used by both sides in the debate. The main positions and theories on each side of the debate are often captured in the terminology used, such as the idea of the watchmaker (an argument that the design of life is so complex it surely required a designer, parallel to a watchmaker), the concept of descent with modification (Charles Darwin's term for biological evolution), and the term irreducible complexity (the ID concept that biological systems are too complex to have evolved as Darwin proposed), among others. This entry uses the terms IDer and evolutionist to label the supporters of each side, recognizing that this includes a variety of positions under each label.

Generally speaking, the main communication strategy used by IDers has been to pull the larger public into the debate and show how ID (as they [Page 406]believe) can contest on an equal footing with the arguments of the scientific community. Ultimately, IDers want to be seen as partaking in an internal scientific debate on the public stage, even if their position has public implications (they think all science does). This strategy represents a fairly radical departure from the clash of science and religion that has occurred from the days of Galileo Galilei to the so-called Scopes trial; IDers generally do not seek the exclusion of science, but seek to make their own inclusion equal. Evolutionists, for the most part, have tried to portray the ID community as outsiders to science because they are religiously motivated and/or do not advance any positive, testable scientific claims. However, unlike IDers, evolutionists have only reluctantly engaged in public debate, primarily because they do not see this debate as a legitimate scientific controversy. In addition, they argue that the admission of ID into science per se ends up disadvantaging mainstream biology, especially in the classroom.