One of the claims made by the detractors of Intelligent Design is that it's really a religious position held by a bunch of Christian fundamentalists eager to use it as a Trojan Horse to sneak creationism into public schools. One would think that the fact that there are so many atheists and agnostics sympathetic to ID might give pause to those who subscribe to this allegation, but the critics seem undeterred by the evidence which, nevertheless, continues to mount. Alfred Russel at Uncommon Descent writes, for instance, about the atheistic scientist Fred Hoyle who was an opponent of Darwinism and who believed that an intelligence of some sort was driving the universe. Here's part of Russel's post:
[T]he truth is that Hoyle absolutely disbelieved in Darwinism. He thought that there is intelligence "out there" in the cosmos, and perhaps in past time, that is directing the progress of life on Earth. In The Intelligent Universe, Hoyle meticulously demolishes Darwinism in great detail and with scientific precision. He even goes after Darwin himself, suggesting that Darwin only understood how evolution might work after he received Wallace's letter detailing the role of natural selection. Hoyle returns time and time again to quote Wallace, whom he evidently admired.
What Russel's post on Hoyle shows is that skepticism about Darwinism, atheism, and sympathy for ID are all compatible with each other.
The claim, made by Richard Dawkins and others, that ID logically entails belief in God is simply false. ID is certainly compatible with belief in God, and it may make belief in God easier to accept - the real reason, in my view, why there's so much opposition to it - but it does not require belief in God.
But, skeptics demand, who else could be the designer if not the God of religious belief? Well, there are lots of atheists who, in order to escape the conclusion that this amazingly fine-tuned universe is the product of a Creator, are suggesting that our universe is just one of a near infinite number of worlds and that, given so many worlds, it's not so implausible to believe that one like ours would exist by chance.
If you buy into this "multiverse" argument (I don't) then you have to admit that in one of those worlds there could well be a civilization so advanced that it has the technology to design and create other worlds. Perhaps our world is the product of such a civilization. If so, it would have been intelligently designed but there would be no necessary religious dimension to belief in the designers.
The point is that ID should not be excluded from classrooms or anywhere else on religious grounds. It's no more religious than is the Darwinian view that all of life and the cosmos can be explained in purely natural terms. To exclude intelligence as a legitimate causal explanation while allowing alternative naturalistic explanations demonstrates a materialist bias against any view which makes the existence of a transcendent intelligence more likely.
RLC