Elliot Sober thinks so and believes that that entailment makes Intelligent Design a religious hypothesis. He also states that, unlike ID, evolution is silent on the matter of whether there is a supernatural designer of the universe.
Here is an outline of his argument for concluding that ID entails a supernatural designer. He states that he doesn't advocate the argument himself, but that it is nevertheless one to which ID theorists need to respond:
1. If a system found in nature is irreducibly complex, then it was caused to exist by an intelligent designer.
2. Some of the minds found in nature are irreducibly complex.
3. Therefore some of the minds found in nature were caused to exist by an intelligent designer.
4. Any mind in nature that designs and builds an irreducibly complex system is itself irreducibly complex.
5. If the universe is finitely old and if cause precedes effect, then at least one of the minds found in nature was not created by any mind found in nature.
6. The universe is finitely old.
7. Causes precede their effects.
8. Therefore, there exists a supernatural intelligent designer.
In this argument, Sober writes, apparently non-religious premises lead to an apparently religious conclusion.
There are a couple of problems with this. For example, what does Sober mean by "supernatural"? He seems to be saying that any designer which transcends this universe would be ipso facto supernatural, but would it? Many physicists speculate about the existence of other universes besides our own. Some are inclined to think that there may be a nearly infinite number of such worlds. Are these scientists engaging in religious speculation when they hypothesize the existence of other worlds? Are these other universes supernatural ab defino?
If they are not supernatural then why must a designer who, like those other worlds, transcends this world and who may, for all we know, be an inhabitant of one of those other worlds, be considered a supernatural being?
And if those other worlds are supernatural realms then we can safely conclude that it must be appropriate for scientists to talk about and study the supernatural because they do it all the time, at least cosmologists do. Why would it be "scientific" to talk about supernatural worlds but not scientific to talk about supernatural beings?
At any rate, whether Sober's argument works or not he is clearly mistaken when he says that evolution is silent on the matter of whether there is a supernatural intelligent designer. He writes:
"the Darwinian theory of evolution is silent on the question of whether a supernatural intelligent designer exists. This is not true of the mini-ID theory. In terms of the contents of theories, it is ID theory, not evolutionary theory, that has implications concerning the existence of supernatural designers."
But this is clearly mistaken. Darwinian evolution states that living things were not designed by an intelligent agent, that they are wholly explicable in terms of unconscious mechanisms. Thus Darwinian evolution most certainly has implications for the existence of an intelligent designer of life, i.e. it states flatly that there isn't one.
Darwinian evolutionists might not (or at least should not) take a position on whether a God exists, but they do take a position on whether a God has designed the living things of the biosphere. To the extent that they deny that living things are intentionally designed, they deny the existence of a supernatural designer. One simply can not deny that living things are designed without denying that there is a designer of living things.
