The Intelligent Design movement is the latest attempt to inject creationist beliefs into the classroom. It is also a concession of sorts.
In the past many people looked to theology for answers about our world. Many mythologies grew out of attempts to explain natural phenomena. Greeks created many gods to explain many different phenomena. Judeo-Christian religions assert that one god is the source of all these phenomena.
Before guys like Copernicus and Galileo came along, men thought that the earth was the center of the universe. Why? It’s because they looked to religious leaders for answers. After all, if anyone would know the answer to all of their questions about the world it would be God, right? And who knew God better than their religious leaders? So when men wrote books claiming inspiration from God and offering answers to those questions about the world they were believed.
Enter the scientific method. When men began building telescopes and saying “here, look for yourself”, the church had to concede that their cosmological model was wrong. The scientific method has since gained enormous credibility as a way to discover information about our world and how it works. It has also generated industries and technologies the world has never seen before. We now mandate science education for our children because of its value to our economy and our improved standard of living.
One of the side effects of increased science education has been a rejection of many old myths that previously explained phenomena in our world. The church still feels threatened by this and believers have made numerous attempts in the past to censor science education, such as outlawing the teaching of evolution, or teaching religious explanations alongside science, such as creationism.
Now the intelligent design movement is claiming that science leads them to the conclusion that there must have been an intelligent agent who designed life on earth. Why? It is because they have conceded that science is a more credible way to discover truths about our world than religion. Given a scientific explanation for origins and a religious explanation for origins, they know that an increasingly science-savvy population will choose the scientific explanation. They are attempting to remove faith from the equation by proving scientifically the existence of God.
In the end, they may do more harm to the creationist position than good. What they offer as scientific proof does not even pass muster as science let alone definitive proof. In the past religious leaders gave people inaccurate answers about our world out of ignorance. That is forgivable. Now they are trying to feed people inaccurate answers about our world using willful deceit under the guise of science. That is not as forgivable.
Intelligent design proponents have conceded the superiority of the scientific method to faith. They know that an assertion based on scientific research is more credible than an assertion based on faith. So they have endeavored to promote their creationist beliefs as scientific. But the scientific method is a tool for finding answers to phenomena. What they have done is search for phenomena for which we don’t yet know the answers and claim that God did it. Of course they won’t say God did it because they want to sound scientific. Casey Luskin, a frequent spokesman for the Discovery Institute authored an article on pastor.com titled “Intelligent Design: Giving Creation Back to God”. That’s what this movement is all about. Apparently they have concluded that they can’t do that with old fashioned faith. It’s just not as convincing as science.