Is intelligent design science, or not? Think carefully before you answer. The modern intelligent design (ID) movement is motivated by theological concerns and trades in on religious authority to meet its aims, but stripped of this background, can ID be relegated to the “junk science” bin? While the answer to this latter question is “Yes”, in a new paper (“The science question in intelligent design”) Sahotra Sarkar argues that proclaiming ID to be non-science without careful consideration does little good.

As Sarkar notes, there is no easily definable demarcation criteria to deem ID science or non-science without further consideration. Separating science from non-science has traditionally been a very thorny problem, and sometimes definitions are proposed that allow obviously non-scientific claims