What drives ID

Cathy Young:

My statement that "Darwin was a Christian" oversimplified the complex reality of Darwin's views, and should have been more nuanced. However, the notion that Darwin developed his 'theory of natural selection as a way to "work out his issues with God" is preposterous, if only because he developed his theory more than a decade before he developed his "issues." It also says a great deal about the mindset of ID proponents, who treats scientific inquiry as essentially driven by ideology.

Incidentally, that is what makes ID a fundamentally non-scientific enterprise: not that it is driven by religion, but that it is driven by ideology. That is, its proponents question evolutionary theory not because they dissatisfied with the scientific/factual evidence for it, but because they don't like its conclusions. To be sure, they look for and claim to find scientific and factual holes in the theory, but the main (or only) reason they start looking is that they don't want it to be true. It makes no difference whether a critique of Darwinian theory is motivated by defense of religion or, say, by concern that biological Darwinism easily lends itself to apologetics for social inequality. In both cases, the motivation is ideological, not scientific.

She nails the problem: ID is ideologically driven, whether or not the ideology is religious or not doesn't really matter. Though I wonder if ID proponents might get a clue and begin pitching their case to the courts as "we push this pseudoscience because of a non-religious agenda." Just as reprehensible, perhaps, but Constitutionally kosher.