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According to the Center for Science and Culture, a program of the Discovery Institute that supports scholars who are working on the theory known as intelligent design, "[t]he theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
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Reading
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Jonathan Witt, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, provides a brief history of the scientific theory of intelligent design on the Discovery Institute's Web site (http://www.discovery.org), in which he explains that the idea of intelligent design actually traces back to Socrates and Plato and claims that the intelligent design movement goes back to sometime between the 1950s and 1970s.
Read the following interview with Phillip Johnson, a leading proponent of intelligent design and author of Darwin on Trial, in which he describes intelligent design and why he feels Darwin's theory is lacking.
In Defense of Intelligent Design
Now read the following paper, "Biological design in science classrooms" by Eugenie S. Scott and Nicholas Matzke, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which they explain why ID is another form of creationism and why it is not used by scientists to explain nature.
Biological design in science classrooms
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Notebook
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What type of evidence would you need to decide whether intelligent design is a valid scientific argument? How does a scientific argument differ from an argument and reasoning in another field, such as philosophy?
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