Intelligent Design

You've probably heard the term used before: Intelligent Design, or more simply, ID. It sounds pretty impressive, and the sponsor site of ID lists it as a science. It is written about in a way that seems reasonable and even legitimate:

"Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The 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. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago." link

This sounds really fine and dandy, but what are they actually selling?

"Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information."

So, perhaps this isn't as sound as it appears.

The actual belief of ID (no, I'm not joking here) is that God created the natural world and place red herrings such as evidence for evolution, the ages of the rocks, radiometric dating, etc. to mislead us and test our faith in him. All of the historical science we have come to believe in is a hoax to separate the faithful from the unfaithful, and to see if we'll continue to believe Scripture in light of evidence. While the propaganda put out by the ID campaigners may mislead you to believe it is a more legitimized science, the core value is just that.

But where's the evidence? They often site "irreducibly complex structures" such as flagellum on bacterium that don't appear to have had any path for evolution to have created them. They also like mentioning the complexity of DNA. However, bioscientists have met with a good amount of success in squashing these arguments through circumstantial evidence, so don't think too long about it.