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Intelligent Design has fizzled.

The movement called "intelligent design" appears to have passed its peak of support. Started about 10 years ago and promoted with millions of dollars from wealthy supporters at the "Discovery Institute", the plan to replace the Theory of Evolution has failed to attract a strong base of support.

1. Christian evangelical churches have mostly failed to embrace ID. Although initially attracted to a philosophical position that attacks evolution, evangelicals have become split along several lines.

1a. Biblical literalists are worried that ID does not support the Genesis accounts of creation and Noah's flood. ID thus takes momentum away from traditional criticisms of evolution. ID also fails to support the so-called Young Earth Creationists (YEC) who believe that the Bible requires the earth to have been formed about 6000 years ago (usually stated as 4004 BCE, from Bishop Usher).

Fundamentalists are particularly unhappy that ID leaves scientific skepticism about the flood completely unaswered. They are aware that the flood myth is vulnerable to serious scientific critiques, doubting that it could possibly have occurred. ID is not helpful to YEC believers, and they are very disappointed.

1b. Evangelicals have also become increasingly concerned that ID never mentions Jesus Christ--the core of their faith in salvation--and ID only mentions an "intelligent designer" rather than God. They have seen what ID critics have pointed out, namely that although everyone winks and knows that the "designer" means God, it also leaves the door open for any number of supernatural entities or dieties to satisfy ID, leaving both God and Christ out of it.

Christians have become disillusioned with ID because they realize that ID allows the Islamic Allah or Hindu deities as equal candidates for the the "designer", thus dethroning Christianity as the claimant. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church has been reluctant to embrace ID, suspecting it as part of the general Protestant "heresy".

1c. Moreover, major rifts have opened within the ID community as to how to promote ID in such court cases as the Dover, Pennsylvania case. Numerous players in the anti-evolutionist groups, such as Duane Gish, tax-evader Ken Hovind of Dinosaur Parks, and others have not only not joined ID but actively promote their own views in opposition. William Morris, founder of the "Institute for Creation Research, ICR" in California has voiced his dismay that his funding is dropping off as funds shift to ID (the "Discovery Instiutute"), so the ICR crowd is not happy with ID. One major website, www.answersingenesis.com, has extensive criticisms of evolution, but is, at best, lukewarm about ID.

2. Traditional Christian churches in the major denominations have not embraced ID either, because, for the most part their members have accepted evolution as a scientifically valid explanation of how life developed on earth. Mainstream Protestants have accepted evolution and rejected both YEC and ID. ID offers little to support their religious beliefs.

3. ID has failed to attract serious support in the scientific community, and practicing scientists find ID provides no guidance for experiments or descriptions of nature. ID has offered no explanations to explain life forms and relationships among life forms other than to say, "God did it." Moreover, ID is presented not in a smooth and compelling way that attracts people, but rather it is presented contentiously, with a chip on its shoulder against the "established evolutionists".

ID's major proponents, lawyer Philip Johnson and DI's Bruce Chapman and Stephen Meyers are not scientists and have little understanding of evolution or scientific processes. ID has been promoted by authors Dembski and Behe, who have developed abstruse concepts like "irreducible complexity" having to do with mouse traps and bacterial flagella that fail to find much popular understanding or support. Complex arguments from information theory, linked to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics--and in which IDists have been proved wrong ("conservation of information")--is not a topic that church-goers or school boards warm to.

From many words and essays trying to define irreducible complexity and specified complexity, ID has failed to specifically define where scientific observation and ID part company. In rejecting evolution, ID tends to agree with the "kinds"--vaguely related to species--mentioned in Genesis, but they have not been able to define what a kind is. ID also fails to account for why all mammals, for example, are remarkably similar in terms of body plan, metabolic processes, fetal development, blood, bones, and DNA---similarities which are readily explained by evolutionary theory. ID has also become trapped in accepting that some examples of evolution are routinely observed--which they accept as "microevolution"--while they reject what they call "macroevolution". ID has never been able to define a boundary between these two terms, which are not used by mainstream scientists. By accepting "micro-evolution", they have implicitly accepted the main tenents of evolution.

4. Within the informed lay communities, ID has failed to gain traction because ID adherents single out the science of evolution to apply "intelligent design" to. ID does not attack the historical and descriptive sciences of astronomy, geology, archeology on similar grounds, nor does ID try to offer its "designer" thesis as an explanation for the sciences of biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics. This serves to undermine ID's claims to a broadly acceptable point of view and allows the IDers to be portrayed as having an axe to grind solely with evolutionary science.

ID has also suffered from adopting a seriously flawed logic, namely that by attacking evolution and "disproving" it, then that shows that ID creationism must be correct. Many have been quick to point out that even if the idea of evolution is found to have flaws, then that does not make ID correct. And in fact, very large understandings in science, such as evolution or the germ theory of disease or gravity, based on mountains of evidence, are rarely thrown out wholesale, but they become modified to incorporate new ideas. (This, of course, is not always true--the philogiston and caloric theories of heat have been abandoned entirely.)

This logical flaw and a general interest in science and technology is probably why a large number of political and social conservatives not only have not embraced ID, but actively defend evolution on dozens of internet forums and boards, such as Free Republic.