Intelligent Design(ID) is the “answer” to evolutionary theory. The ID crowd says that every living thing was designed for a particular purpose. According to Intelligent Design, there is no evolution among animals. Certainly not among people. Everything was designed by a Designer. Indeed, because the ID advocates think pretty highly of themselves, the Designer is an Intelligent Designer. Hence, the name Intelligent Design.
Like zombies that just won't die, the ID crowd has made it's way into the news again. The Kansas State Board of Education has redefined science. The original legal definition was simply, “seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us.” Now the definition is, “[a] continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”
It's the Scientific Method. Seeing this language show up from religious right is quite a surprise. The defenders of Jebus used the phrase “natural phenomena” which rules out “supernatural phenomena” and should leave you sort of confused on the motives of the Intelligent Design/Creationist movement. The original definition seems easier to exploit than the Scientific Method.
No matter, now there is clear language. It's tempting to use this legal language to prove that the Intelligent Designer is dumb but that's just too easy and it's exactly what the religious right wants.
Intelligent Design is about control from surface to core. They replaced “creation” with “design”, abandoned all mention of the Geosynchronous Orbital Detector(GOD) and specifically target evolutionary theory. They aren't smart about their words. In Kansas, they don't have to be. You don't see religious fundamentalists trying to protect the planet. You see them trying to distance humans from chimps in the name of their Designer. When people are allowed to ask questions and refer to various sources of information, they are less likely to be controlled.
The Intelligent Design crowd is in a war against atheism. They picked science as their battleground. It doesn't matter that science and religion are not mutually exclusive concepts. It doesn't matter that scientists from Einstein to the present cite “Spinoza's God” as their own and consider their work to be a way of finding God through nature. It doesn't matter that the real atheists are in the “social” sciences.
If they had more tact, they could put together a reasonable counter to evolutionary theory. As a programmer, I know I could build a reasonable counter-argument to evolution involving a “designer” but the ID crowd won't like the conclusion:
God has moved on to other projects. He didn't spend all that time programming so he could deal with your individual nonsense. Accept the code, hack the code or die.
