What is your understanding of the term "Intelligent design"?

To me, intelligent design means things come about by a plan, not by chance. Similar to a contractor using plans to build a house vs. dumping all the materials on the job site and waiting for a home to appear.

However, I also believe that not every single variation within species were created. I believe in adaptation within the species-different birds adapted to suit different climates, different insects for different tasks, pre-historic goats adapting into modern goats for instance.

But I have not been convinced that species evolved into different species-reptiles into birds for instance. Even though they have similarities, those similarities could be the result of a really good plan or design. Kind of a "Hey this rib cage thingy works pretty well-I think I will use it again." I am not denigrating the theory of evolution, but I just have not been convinced yet.

Thank you for a thought provoking question.

The term Intelligent Design is used by hard-core Creationists to try to get maintream science to accept Creationism by using a different word.

Basically, "God created everything, but even though the modern goat only evolved 100,000 years ago, it was His plan from the beginning. It only looks like what we consider evolution, because what we consider evolution is entirely God's work, totally pre-planned since the beginning of time, because He wanted everything in 2010 to exist exactly as it is right now, even though he's mean enough to let us think that we came up with the idea on our own."

A design method appropriated by an intelligent being rather than a natural process.

:-)

"Cellular machinery and biochemical systems appear to have too many necessary parts and be too complex to have evolved, therefore they must have been designed."

To learn more about Intelligent Design, read "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe.

The book will make you think.

It is a term used by creationists who want their beliefs to sound intelligent and maybe even factual when they are neither.