Intelligent Design
Dave over at Logical Meme has a thorough post on this controversy which should not really be a controversy at all. It is a long post well worth reading. Here is one of my favorite passages:
Nor does ID entail rejection of evolutionary theory. Many a respectable philosopher and scientist have entertained the possibility that some form of higher intelligence might be the theoretical construct that best ‘explains’ how we perceive the reality we perceive and what might lie beyond it: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and contemporary philosophers such as Alvin Plantiga, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Antony Flew.
At a minimum, ID and the basic philosophical position of deism (be it Gaia, Buddhism, extraterrestrial intelligence, God, or the theoretical construct of a humanly-unconceptualizable, advanced agency) serves to keep the precepts of reductionism (elsewhere referred to as ‘naturalism’ or ‘physicalism’) from becoming entrenched as dogma. There are plenty of well-founded and respectable philosophical reasons to problematize the assumptions of reductionism. The bizarre, counterintuitive “reality” at the quantum level, for instance, completely violates our “common sense” notions of causality and its accompanying reductionism, leading some scientist-philosophers such as David Bohm to posit a nonreductive ‘implicate order’ (a holistic concept) as the best theoretical explanation for the paradoxes that emerge from Bell’s Theorem.
Go read it all to understand both the ID thinking as well as the silly issue this lawsuit is actually about–4 paragraphs read aloud. Geez.