Although languages are used by intelligent humans, languages change not by design or human planning but according to rules that only recently are becoming understood. His Own Home Pennock also uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor to describe the confusion and squabbling among antievolutionists themselves, detailing the nuances of intelligent-design creationists, young earthers, old earthers, progressive creationists and others. Intelligent-design creationists try to keep the peace by avoiding any specific empirical claim about what the designer might have done, relying instead on bashing evolution. The Supreme Court held in Edwards that teachers may teach secular and scientific alternatives to evolution, but intelligent-design creationism fails on both counts. Continental drift, punctuated equilibrium and quantum theory had to be accepted by the scholarly community before being taught at the high school level, and this is the task for intelligent design.
Intelligent design remains a virtually empty bandwagon.
Certainly there are legal and scientific problems with the teaching of intelligent-design creationism. But perhaps of most concern, it misrepresents science as an inherently antireligious enterprise, and evolution as the first step down this slippery slope. This is no way to improve science literacy in America.