ID was initially intended to be a legally-defensible way to insert creationism into public schools. This ended in what ID inventor Philip Johnson called a "train wreck" in Kitzmiller v. Dover.
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.
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Although the phrase intelligent design had featured previously in theological discussions of the argument from design,[10] its first publication in its present use as an alternative term for creationism was in Of Pandas and People,[11][12] a 1989 creationist textbook intended for high school biology classes. The term was substituted into drafts of the book, directly replacing references to creation science and creationism, after the 1987 Supreme Court's Edwards v. Aguillard decision barred the teaching of creation science in public schools on constitutional grounds.[13] From the mid-1990s, the intelligent design movement (IDM), supported by the Discovery Institute,[14] advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula.[7] This led to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which found that intelligent design was not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and that the public school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
ID has had a rocky path since, with some, including Philip Johnson ( at least initially a creationist) saying that perhaps the designer was "a space alien." Discovery Institute fellow Michael Behe now says that he accepts evolution, even though he thinks God has to step in now and then to make it work.
And another Discovery Institute fellow, Michael Denton seems to have become a deist in his book Nature's Destiny, breaking completely with creationists in an explicit way:
t is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science–that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called “special creationist school.” According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving God’s direct intervention in the course of nature, each of which involved the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world–that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies.
In large measure, therefore, the teleological argument presented here and the special creationist worldview are mutually exclusive accounts of the world. In the last analysis, evidence for one is evidence against the other. Put simply, the more convincing is the evidence for believing that the world is prefabricated to the end of life, that the design is built into the laws of nature, the less credible becomes the special creationist worldview.
Michael Denton Nature's Destiny p. xi
This erosion of creationists to deism is an ongoing problem, possibly accounting for the noted decline in number of evangelical Christians in the United States.
