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Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science. Meanwhile, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in their present form or guided their development. As a succession of intelligent-design proponents appeared before the Kansas State Board of Education earlier this month, it was possible to wonder whether the movement’s scientific coherence was beside the point. Intelligent design has come this far by faith.

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In October, 2004, the boar decreed that “students will be made aware o gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of othe theories of evolution including, but not limite to, intelligent design.

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I love when the creationists hide behind buzzwords that they no nothing about. "Intelligent design" is a COSMOLOGICAL hypothesis (not a theory, merely conjecture at this point), proposed by the great Stephen Hawking. It has nothing to do with the origins of life on planet earth.

Intelligent Design is one way to describe the origin of the universe, or at least OUR universe (read A Brief History of Time for clarification of this point). Hawking postulates that the underlying structure of our universe shows evidence of what he dubs a design from intelligence. But don't hold your breaths, creationists, it's not what you think.

He means to say that our universe shows traits indicating that it may have required some external input of information at it's inception. (By the way, "information" actually means "enthalpy", in the physical sense of the word, or, and is more generally known as "heat", go study thermodynamic theory for more info.)

The bottom line of all this? It may be that our universe required a "First Mover", or an external source of energy before it began to expand. This First Mover, is not a capital-g God necessarily. For all we know, it could be a photon or a packet of radiation.

Hawking's Intelligent Design is a serious, and narrowly-defined idea, it's not a catch-phrase that you can use willy-nilly. It is most definetly NOT a proof for God, and it is most definetly NOT a theory you can point to in order to refute evolution.
When creationists invoke it, they are using it as a deceptive euphemism for what they are REALLY getting at, which is "creation science". (What an oxymoron that is...)

[ 24 May 2005: Message edited by: cabana me banana ]