Intelligent design is an attempt to wedge claims about the action of a supernatural designer into science, and most troublingly, into science classrooms. The history of ID shows that it is merely a relabeling of older forms of creationism, and its promoters stretch the definition of science in attempting to force their religious beliefs into classrooms.
Science is a process for testing claims, not simply a collection of facts. As such, not all seemingly factual claims can be considered science. For a claim to be scientific, it must be possible to investigate using scientific methods. Claims about the supernatural are inherently untestable by those methods, leaving such supernatural claims outside the realm of science as a matter of practice.
Attempts to force supernatural claims into science have a long history of failure. While religious belief has certainly inspired many scientists, explanations of natural phenomena in terms of the supernatural have not proven to be scientifically fruitful. Nonetheless, creationists in the United States have a long history of insisting that their religious views on the origin of the world, of life, and of humanity must be taught in science classes. The ID movement adopts the same rhetoric and tactics as earlier creationists, while maintaining a strategic ambiguity about the supernatural details of their claims.
There are reasons for this ambiguity. For one thing, it enables the ID movement to portray ID as scientifically respectable to the public, while still reassuring its fundamentalist base that it’s intended to promote sectarian religious beliefs. For example, William Dembski, a Discovery Institute fellow and prominent promoter of ID, tells secular audiences that ID is a thoroughly scientific endeavor. Yet in a book published by a Christian publisher he wrote that ID is “just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
ID’s strategic ambiguity is also intended to unite creationists who differ on issues such as the age of the earth, the span of time over which God created, and the extent to which living things share common ancestry. “Life in the ‘big tent’ of the intelligent design community,” Paul Nelson, another Discovery Institute fellow and promoter of ID, explains, “certainly requires a period of acclimation, but Christians – in particular, traditional creationists – should welcome their new ID surroundings.”
That ambiguity would be useless to a real scientific theory, which needs to make specific claims about the natural world. Unsurprisingly, then, Nelson acknowledges that ID does not meet the normal standards for a science. “Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community,” he wrote, “is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem." Testifying on behalf of an ID policy in Dover, PA, sociologist of science Steve Fuller similarly admitted that ID is not yet science – proposing an "affirmative action" program to help it along.
Others seek to have ID treated as science by radically redefining “science” so that it appears to prove their theological views. In 2005, the Kansas Board of Education held hearings on science standards revisions which would have redefined science to allow teachers to present supernatural explanations in science classes. At public hearings in favor of that revision, witnesses spoke in favor of revisions as necessary for discussing ID in science classes. As a measure of their understanding of science, many of the witnesses for ID insisted that they did not know whether the earth was 10,000 years old or 4.55 billion.
There is no merit to the claim that we must redefine science in order to allow sectarian views into classrooms. Until and unless intelligent design produces research and new insights, it cannot be considered a valid science, let alone appropriate for a science curriculum. Voters in Pennsylvania and Kansas rejected these attempts to redefine science, and a federal judge ruled that ID’s religious content makes it unconstitutional in public school science classes.
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