Why is ID a problem for our society? Because it exposes the fundamental fault-line in society about whether there is a God or not. This debate is as old as Scripture (The fool says in his heart there is no God) and found its full expression through the Greek philosophers who anticipated all the discussions of today two and a half millenniums ago. But in the last century the battle seemed to have been won by the atheists. The 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate in Oxford was reported as having been won by the atheist Huxley, the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee was actually won by the prosecution but presented in ‘Inherit the Wind’ as having been won by the defence. The 2005 Dover trial in Pennsylvania prevented the teaching of intelligent design in schools, and Richard Dawkins’s work is required reading in science classes in the UK to this day. If you go to a school or university today, the overall ethos is that belief in God is at best an optional extra for those poor souls who want to believe despite all the evidence against it. The smart people, however, are atheists, and they believe in science.
How intelligent design differs from other approaches
Usually, the debate is framed as between believing in God and believing in science. You can be a biblical creationist, believing God created the world in 6 days, or you can be a scientist who knows that the universe is 13.9 billion years old and that we arrived here through evolution. Or something like that. It is usually put as:
God versus science
That means all the attributes of science are on one side and all the attributes of belief are on the other. Who would choose feelings over facts? Who would choose opinions over truth? Only very foolish people whom you should pity. This is why most atheists who want to stay in the cool group will label intelligent design theorists as ‘creationists’ to avoid having to engage with what they say.Intelligent design frames the problem differently. ID doesn’t start with a belief in God. It doesn’t start with a belief in the inspiration of Scriptures. ID starts with the same physical data as the atheist and just asks the question, ‘is this evidence for atheism or for theism?’ ID is all about evidence, and evidence supports a case, and the case is that the scientific evidence points more towards theism than atheism. That’s why ID is so unpopular in the academy: we’re playing their game better than them. We’re using the same vocabulary and evidence, but showing that the evidence supports a belief in God, rather than a belief in no-god. Notice, they are both beliefs. The question is, which belief is the more reasonable?
