[OmahaFields]

That's not the *intelligent designer* that is at issue. Nobody is denying that humans design things. What is at question is the evidence for a designer of the universe and a director of the evolution of life.

Those things you call ID could have been designed by aliens from outer space, no?

[mjolnir]

Of course they could have been, OmahaFields; that's why Francis Crick in the eighties was doing ID as much as Behe later on, etc. ID doesn't is supposed to identify makers of intelligence, not the identity of that intelligence.

Nor does ID purport to be a version of the argument from design at the biological level. That would be to engage in the birthday fallacy. Suppose ID claims that all life forms bear marks of design-- that doesn't imply that there's only one designer.

There's nothing wrong with what the Discovery Institute is doing here. It isn't asking that ID be taught in Kansas schools by any means-- it's only asking that teachers equip students to critically analyze evolutionary theory by presenting them with the scientific evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution.

Even a very productive theory has limits to its scope. ID isn't the the only challenge to the what those limits are--Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" presented such a challenge at the level of pre-biotic evolution, Lynn Margulis has challenged the ubiquity of evolution as competition and so on. Presenting evidence for and against aspects of Darwinian evolution makes biology more interesting-- this is not an ID issue, it is an education issue.

Incidentally, I hope you don't mind my asking why you use the tag line you do. Thomas Jefferson was a great thinker and in his thoughts on natural rights, which thought to be derived from the God he saw plain evidence of in nature, he provided a foundation upon which Lincoln stood to free this country from its slavery. In his writings on agrarianism and limited government, he even shows some hints of conservatism.

But the side of jefferson you're quoting is the one which was bigoted toward all established religion, especially Catholicism. This was the same side of Jefferson which on the that basis approved of the first great leftist totalitarian experiment, the French Revolution. Whenever one speaks of the Enlightenment, one should carefully distinguish between the French/Continental Enlightenment
and the American/British Scottish Enlightenments. Only the legacy of latter is compatible with conservatism imo.