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What is Intelligent Design?

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Intelligent Design
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Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.The new war is not about evolution and creation, but about Darwinism and something called ‘intelligent design.’

Intelligent design maintains that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than unguided natural processes. Since ID relies on evidence rather than on scripture or religious doctrines, it is not creationism or a form of religion.

ID restricts itself to a simple question: does the evidence point to design in nature?

ID does not deny the reality of variation and natural selection; it just denies that those phenomena can accomplish all that Darwinists claim they can accomplish.

ID does not maintain that all species were created in their present form; indeed, some ID advocates have no quarrel with the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor. ID challenges only the sufficiency of unguided natural processes and the Darwinian claim that design in living things is an illusion rather than a reality.
To order The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, click here. To find out more information about the book, visit the book’s website here.

Jonathan Wells

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
A molecular and cell biologist, Jonathan Wells (1942-2024) was author of the path-breaking book Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (2000), which exposed serious inaccuracies in how evolution has been taught in contemporary science textbooks. A Senior Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, Wells was also a proponent of the scientific theory of intelligent design.
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