Intelligent Design does not name a designer. Surely it could have been caused be an advanced alien civilization instead of a supernatural entity?
Intelligent Design proponents may publicly be elusive about the nature of the designer, but in speeches they give to church groups and in their own writings they make it clear that they believe the designer to be the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible. Almost all the leaders of the ID movement are Christian. Philip Johnson, one of the founders of the ID movement, created the Wedge Strategy to:
- To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
- To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. Please see here.
Philip Johnson himself has made it clear who he thinks the designer is. In his 1997 book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds he states:
“If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,...We call our strategy the "wedge." pg. 91-92
Johnson has made similar statements that show that ID is a religious movement, and that it is a Christian movement.
In an interview for Touchstone Magazine in 2002 he said:
“So the question is: "How to win?" That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing" —the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do.”
Other leaders of the ID movement make it clear that they too think that the God of the Bible is the designer. William Dembski said in one of his books entitled Intelligent Design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology (Dembski, 1999), and in it he states that "The conceptual soundings of the [intelligent design] theory can in the end only be located in Christ" (p. 210).
Dembski has repeatedly made similar statements:
"Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology, which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ. Indeed, once materialism is no longer an option, Christianity again becomes an option. True, there are then also other options. But Christianity is more than able to hold its own once it is seen as a live option. The problem with materialism is that it rules out Christianity so completely that it is not even a live option. Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration." (Dembski, "Intelligent Design's Contribution to the Debate Over Evolution", Designinference.com website, February 2005)
These are just a few examples of the religious nature the ID proponents give to the designer. As Michael Shermer states in his book Science Friction (p. 199) “ID arguments are reasons to believe if you already believe.” In general as people become more educated their belief in God decreases. The ID movement is led by highly educated, religious men who are trying to justify their religious beliefs through science.
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