Intelligent Design and the State University: Accepting the Challenge

The emerging discipline of Intelligent Design (ID) is a legitimate scientific research program and, therefore, should be taught as such at the state university. I argue that the design inference is a reliable means of detecting design in nature which relies on no uniquely religious assumptions. However, ID does grant some intellectual credibility to Christian theism since it directly challenges the monopoly of naturalism in science and thus opens the door to claims that the Christian God is the Designer of nature.