Finding Your Way around ID
If you are a casual visitor to our website, an interested non-specialist, or even if you are sceptical about Intelligent Design (ID), this is the section to begin with. It aims to explain in an easily accessible way the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design in Nature and some of its wider implications. Because ID is also an intuitive position, the arguments are readily understood by the non-specialist.
This section also includes a series of answers to a range of common questions about ID which have been asked at seminars held across the UK. You may find it helpful to read these through as they are broadly aimed at a lay audience.
Wider consideration of all these matters can be found elsewhere in the website. To make it easier to find what you are looking for, you can also use the sections listed under Find Resources and Schools of Thought on the Home Page.
ID holds that certain features of the universe and of life are best explained by an intelligent cause and not an unguided process such as natural selection. The evidence for this is drawn from a wide range of the sciences including biology, geology, cosmology, chemistry, physics and psychology.
Some specific areas of evidence for ID are the ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life, the irreducible complexity of biological systems, and the existence of vast digitally-coded information banks in the genetic code of all living things. All this builds up into an impressive and convincing case for design in the natural world.
It is also important to recognise that ID has profound philosophical and religious implications. It is clearly consistent with a theistic view of the universe, but does not start from that position.
It is somewhat surprising that ID has become such a controversial topic and its proponents the target of significant abuse. One reason for this is that ID challenges the current consensus that scientific explanations of origins must be confined to purely natural or physical processes which, it is claimed, rule out an intelligent cause for the universe.
It is also not widely appreciated that ID, though not by that name, is the position which gave us Western science in the first place. The great pioneers of modern science like Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Clerk-Maxwell, Faraday and Kelvin, pursued their work because they believed that the universe was designed by a Creator and therefore capable of rational investigation. But largely since the time of Darwin, the fundamentally illogical idea of an accidental universe without design or purpose has gained widespread acceptance. However, the fresh scientific insights of the modern ID movement confirm the convictions of the great scientists of the past.