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intelligent design
Sign in to saveAlso known as ID, intelligent design theory
argument for the existence of God
Intelligent design is the argument that certain features of the natural world are so complex and well-organized that they must have been created by an intelligent designer rather than arising through natural processes like evolution. It matters because proponents present it as scientific evidence for God's existence, while critics argue it relies on philosophy rather than testable science.
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- creationism
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- intelligent design movement
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- Commons category
- Intelligent design
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- Category:Intelligent design
- opposite of
- argument from poor design
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- Template:Intelligent Design
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Encyclopedic overview
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". ID presents two main arguments against evolutionary explanations: irreducible complexity and specified complexity, asserting that certain biological and informational features of living things are too complex to be the result of natural selection, but these assertions were rebutted by detailed scientific examination, and evolutionary explanations they claimed to be impossible had been published in peer reviewed research.
The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States. ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “intelligent design” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.