Talk:Intelligent design/FAQ - Wikipedia

A1: ID is a form of creationism, and many sources argue that it is identical. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and Phillip E. Johnson, one of the founders of the ID movement, stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept.^[1][2]

Not everyone agrees with this. For example, philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that intelligent design is very different from creation science (see "Public Education and Intelligent Design", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 36, no. 2, 2008). However, this perspective is not representative of most reliable sources on the subject.

Although intelligent design proponents do not name the designer, they make it clear that the designer is the Abrahamic god.^[1][3][4][5]

In drafts of the 1989 high-school level textbook Of Pandas and People, almost all derivations of the word "creation", such as "creationism", were replaced with the words "intelligent design".^[6]

Taken together, the Kitzmiller ruling, statements of ID's main proponents, the nature of ID itself, and the history of the movement, make it clear—Discovery Institute's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—that ID is a form of creationism, modified to appear more secular than it really is. This is in line with the Discovery Institute's stated strategy in the Wedge Document.

A3: According to Wikipedia's sourcing policy, Wikipedia:Verifiability, papers that support ID should be used as primary sources to explain the nature of the concept.

The article as it stands does not cite papers that support ID because no such papers have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Behe himself admitted this under cross examination, during the Kitzmiller hearings, and this has been the finding of scientists and critics who have investigated this claim.^{[7][8][9][10]} In fact, the only article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that made a case for intelligent design was quickly withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal's peer-review standards.^[11][12]

Broadly speaking, the articles on the Discovery Institute list all fail for any of four reasons:

1. The journal has no credible editorial and peer-review process, or the process was not followed
2. The journal is not competent for the subject matter of the article
3. The article is not genuinely supportive of ID
4. The article is published in a partisan ID journal such as PCID

If you wish to dispute the claim that ID has no support in peer-reviewed publications, then you will need to produce a reliable source that attests to the publication of at least one paper clearly supportive of ID that underwent rigorous peer-review in a journal on a relevant field.

A5: The Discovery Institute is a reliable primary source about its views on ID, though it should not be used as an independent secondary source.

The core mission of the Discovery Institute is to promote intelligent design. The end purpose is to duck court rulings that eliminated religion from the science classroom, by confusing people into conflating science and religion. In light of this, the Discovery Institute cannot be used as a reference for anything but their beliefs, membership and statements. Questionable sources, according to the sourcing policy, WP:V, are those with a poor reputation for fact-checking or with no editorial oversight, and should only be used in articles about themselves. Articles about such sources should not repeat any contentious claims the source has made about third parties, unless those claims have also been published by reliable sources.