Resolved: The idea of Intelligent Design is a product of religion, not science.

The reason the idea of Intelligent Design was scientific is because it was a reasonable conclusion when the real answer was unknown. I don't know what caused the expansion of the universe but claiming it was goblins is unneeded and moreover completely worthless and doesn't give us a shred of insight. As far as I'm concerned this is the core purpose and effect of science. Those things which allow us to predict and determine things we otherwise would fail to about the universe. There is a lot to science. There are hunches, hypotheses, theories, mechanisms, studies, conclusions, and models. And certainly much of scientific advance comes from the observation that things which are obviously true are non-obviously false. It really does seem as though the sun revolves around the Earth. The moon revolves around the Earth and seems to be a similar although darker body. The modern iteration of intelligent design tries to push a designer or more aptly a Designer. You don't see the bits of theory which fit the premise that life was created intelligently because we understand evolution to a good degree and see that it is even better at explaining not just the why but the how when and where. Why does the cheetah run fast? Certainly this is the evolution of a predator towards speed in order to better hunt its prey. The faster the organism the better its chances of properly occupying that niche. However, to say that they were designed to run fast to catch fast prey isn't a complete disaster. We don't see slow predators and fast prey. We see a remarkable congruency in such things. Where we declare that vestiges well disappear in an organism for which it is unneeded one could just as aptly note that they weren't designed with worthless parts. Every part of an organism does something. If we notice bird has a large strong beak we can conclude it was designed for some purpose that requires a large strong beak. When we observe that bird cracking large nuts, we shall not be surprised. -- With intelligent design we can make remarkable predictions about life and about organisms. Evolution explains what we see here and more, but to declare that Intelligent Design was and is worthless is a completely farce. One could still make the most general of Panglossian conclusions that everything has a purpose for which it was "designed" or which allowed an organism an edge within it's niche. ID explains a great deal about the world. Evolution simply explains far more and gives us answers to questions we were too stupid to even ask. As for your arguments that intelligent design is the product of religion and not science, I'll one up you: Religion is largely the product of intelligent design. It wasn't just decided that life was created by a designing intelligence and then we saw the clever designs of nature, rather it seems quite apparent that detecting the designs and qualities of nature is remarkably innate to humans in general. Since designs as such have only been seen as the contrivances of man and are far superior to those of men, clearly such designs must be the work of far better men than ourselves... and thus religion seems a rather remarkable and yet naive conclusion of simple human observation of the majesty of nature. The usefulness of this assumption is without question and far beyond the usefulness of anything in religion. In fact, I'm a bit offended that you're so ready to toss the hypothesis to the religious just because they are inclined to take it. It is certainly fair to say that proponents of intelligent design are largely religious. If they were remotely scientific they would have switched over to evolution after the 1860s. However, by the same token pretty much every scientist in the world prior to the publication of Origin of the Species was a believer in intelligent design even those deists of few religious aspirations. Furthermore, there's no divide between religion and irreligion at the time. Certainly the religious were quick to accept something which meshed well with their religious views. Just as the religious today are quick to cite the big bang a "religious creation of the universe". --- I will now respond to some of the lesser points you made. Intelligent design wasn't obliterated rather it was overshadowed by the mechanisms of evolution. The argument from design was never a complete failure but at it's core a fairly important insight. There is something different about life that doesn't just randomly happen. It has been hijacked from its origin as a good inkling and used as a stand-in replacement for creationism. You say that "the very stupidity and lack of scientific basis of intelligent design, actually helped along the progress of science and the scientific revolution" -- this statement is completely objectionable. Science isn't helped by idiots standing in the way. The idea that being really really wrong is a boon to science is absurd. There were a large number of flaws with the argument from design, a number of them laid out by Hume and others. The answer of God doesn't work because it causes an infinite regress, the only conclusion one can draw from that logic is that life was made by intelligence rather than any god, the fossil record shows a progression from the less complex to the more complex, and large quantities of very new data was coming around all the time that simply didn't work for the hypothesis. Data which was aptly explained by Darwin rather succinctly. You want to claim that science was helped by how wrong the concept of design was when, in fact, it was helped by the concept. We knew there was a problem to be solved because of the apparent design in life. Galileo wasn't ridiculed, he was arrested. Arresting great minds and burning others at the stake does not help a scientific revolution progress. The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on ID. The Dover case was not appealed and isn't overly binding across the US. Although, I must admit that Judge Jones certainly made the right choice in the case. Certainly creationism got kicked in the butt in 1989 it quickly jumped ship to intelligent design in a completely indefensible and silly way. My argument isn't that the modern ID isn't a joke, but that the initial ID wasn't a joke in the least. The creationists simply jumped to the same intuitions from the religious sphere to the scientific sphere and skipped the general scientific step of paying attention to the actual science at the time. >>Something that is the product of science would be evolution, or Isaac Newton's "Philosophiï¿½ Naturalis Principia Mathematica". These things are a consequence of science, and the scientific method, intelligent design is not. I suggest you read the last 25 words of Principia and try again on that front.