"ID" would also be at home in classes on political movements, or propaganda techniques.
I was disagreeing with the notion that students (of all people), should be allowed to decide what is or isn't science.
" Actually, if covered in a class of the philosophy, critical thinking, comparative religions,"
ID and it's unfortunate reliance on Paley are being discussed in philosophy. The following writer makes a fair defence of Paley but demonstrates the no less savant than Thomsas Aquinas had a better grasp of science and its relation to scripture centuries before Paley.
http://www.unav.es/cryf/paley.html
One might note that while Aquinas holds that God's efficient causality is required for created things to remain in existence, he sees no need for God's special intervention for the production of the forms of non-human living things, and even from non-living matter, the reason being that the organisms' activities indicate that their forms or souls are material forms; and thus they exist as a potency of matter to which correspond material agents capable of actualizing them.30
It is said in Genesis I:20: 'The waters produced the reptile having a living soul'; and so it seems that the sensitive souls of reptiles and other animals are from the action of the corporeal elements.» «Souls of this sort do not exceed the principles of natural things. And this is manifest from considering the operation of them.31
Aquinas then would hold that non-human life could be made in a test tube from the appropriate elements by the application of the appropriate agents - something which Paley denies (322, cited below).
Marie I. George (St. John's University, Jamaica, New York).
Will appear in the Science, Philosophy, Theology, ed. John O'Callaghan (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2002).