One often hears, despite numerous attempts to disabuse people of the notion, that Intelligent Design is religious because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the designer must be the God of the Bible. This is nonsense, of course, but the objection persists because were it ever to be given up it would open the door for ID to be taught in public schools and once that happened Darwinism would go the way of Marxism and Freudianism.
Telic Thoughts has a post on a 1982 speech given by Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. Hoyle was an atheist but, as impossible as it might seem to some of ID's opponents, he believed in the intelligent design of life on earth.
Read the article to see what Hoyle advocated. The point is that ID, to the disappointment of theists and atheists alike, does not necessarily entail the God of the Bible and is, ironically, compatible with both. What it's not compatible with is the materialist interpretation of Darwin which says that physical processes like the laws of chemistry and physics, plus time and chance, are all that's required to explain life and the cosmos.
Hoyle believes that the designer is part of this universe. It is possible, though, that the designer transcends this universe, but is still not the God that Christians worship. Physicists talk of the possibility of other universes existing beyond our own. If there are such worlds out there it's possible that an inhabitant of one of them designed our world. If speculations about the existence of other worlds is a legitimate topic of scientific discourse then so must be the possibility of an intelligence in such a world being capable of designing other worlds. Again, the point is that whether ID is a scientific theory or not, it is clearly not religious. It does, however, have religious implications, just as does materialistic Darwinism.
RLC
