Design, Intelligent

Most broadly construed, intelligent design (ID) is the name chosen for a controversial strategy, combining both theory and practice, which is aimed at giving the ancient, philosophical design argument new life in the sciences, especially in U.S. public high school life science classrooms. More narrowly, the term is qualified so as to collect acts, persons, or propositions as elements related to the strategy—as in ID theorist, ID conference, ID tenet, or ID curriculum. The most contentious of these is surely ID science, or any connotation of the same. Indeed, ID flatly rejects contemporary science, including its thinking about time.

As theory, ID is the thesis that the sciences require an appeal to intelligent design to succeed at appointed explanatory tasks. As practice, ID embraces numerous forms of publicity for its theory, especially those that create the impression that the theory is, or ought to be accepted as, good science. These practices include television and radio appearances, private funding, journal articles, conferences, Web sites, rhetoric, sophistry, lawsuits, textbooks, mass-market books, curriculum packages, teacher-training programs, membership drives, campus events, and a host of religious, social, and political associations. ID theory and practice are carried out almost exclusively under the auspices of the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank located in Seattle, Washington.

The full strategy of ID was described by Phillip Johnson in his book of 1997 and again in an online document, known as the Wedge Document, prepared for the Discovery Institute. Both treatments envision three phases scheduled over 20 years. The [Page 295]latter commits ID to the task of defeating “scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and to replacing “materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God.” In the first phase, envisioned as a 5-year operation starting in 1999, ID proponents in the United States will publish 30 books and numerous articles. In the second phase, they will seek publicity for their work by contacting and cajoling U.S. broadcast media, lawmakers, congressional staff, and op-ed pages in newspapers. This phase is meant to prepare the public for reception of ID thinking. The third phase aims at “cultural confrontation and renewal.” At this point the movement plans to use the courts to force their ideas into science classrooms.