ID

Bush's recent remarks have lit a firestorm of media frenzy, and not all of it from simply left-wing outfits. Even those on the right are having their say, and often coming down against the President. The almost universal line of thought is religious. This whole "Intelligent Design" thing is religiously motivated, presumably by the religious right. Some on the right have called it a new way of saying Genesis Creationism. All around, the focus is on it as if it is a religiously based movement.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The failure is in making distinctions. The movement is not religiously based. It is not founded on any religious belief. It does, however, have religious and theological implications. The thinking must go that if it has theological implications, it must have theological foundations. This is absurd. Anyone who knows anything about the ID movemtn knows that it is founded on science, and the arguable founder of the movement, Michael Behe, is a microbiologist. His earth-shaking book, Darwin's Black Box, is based on his observations in microbiology.

The simplest way to think of the design movement is to think of an analogy. Take Mt. Rushmore. Just looking at it, you know that it is designed. You do not have to know anything about it's history, the designer, or anything related, you still know that it has specified complexity , in the words of William Dembski, perhaps ID's leading theorist. You know that an intelligent agent made it, that it was not the result of random rock formation. This is in many ways the ID movement. It detects design in nature. Like Mt. Rushmore, some things in nature exhibit design, and intelligent design at that.