User:Filll/Introduction to Intelligent Design draft

Intelligent Design is the thesis that aspects of the universe and life are too complicated to be have been created by natural processes. Instead, some features of the world like living things, atoms, and DNA, are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligent being or force.

The concepts behind intelligent design date back thousands of years as ways of proving the existence of God. However, this argument in relation to the complexity of life became less convincing when scientific theories about evolution found that natural selection and other natural processes could explain how different species of plants and animals developed. Intelligent design has recently been heavily promoted by the Discovery Institute, a lobbying group in the United States, with the claim that some features needed supernatural intervention

Most scientists do not think that there are good reasons to believe Intelligent Design. Many people think that Intelligent Design is a form of Creationism or just another name for it. In 2005, in the Dover trial, a United States judge decided that Intelligent Design was creationism in disguise to try to get around the First Amendment.

History

Religious opposition to evolution being taught in schools developed in the USA in the 1920s, and when courts ruled that the First Amendment meant that schools could not be prevented from teaching evolution in science classes, creationists tried to get their ideas of sudden miraculous creation of species taught beside evolution under the name of creation science. When the courts ruled that this too was against the First Amendment, a creation science textbook that was being prepared was changed so that all references to "creation" now referred to "intelligent design".