Kyle Alspach, "Design proponents take movement to Web" (2005)

Intelligent design has gone online with a Web site that offers a daily dose of commentary from the leaders of the movement.

Called Intelligent Design The Future, the Web log — or blog — was launched in March by theorists who support the idea that life came about not through evolution but by the deliberate design of some intelligent creator. Among the blog’s eight contributors are mathematician William Dembski, biochemist Michael Behe and philosophers Stephen Meyer and Jay Richards.

A blog is an online journal that contains links to related information elsewhere on the Internet. Most blogs focus on a specific subject — such as knitting or particle physics — and some feature more than one contributor. Posting is done at the whim of the contributors.

“I think where I see it being most effective is in consciousness-raising and getting the word out,” said Dembski, head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s new Center for Science and Theology in Louisville, Ky. “I’m hoping that this blog will help bring people out of the woodwork who are interested in pursuing these ideas.”

The idea that the universe’s design is too complex to have come together by chance has sparked a national debate in the United States. This year, 10 bills that would lessen the importance of evolution in the classroom have been introduced in nine states, according to the National Center for Science Education. The most recent bill, introduced in Pennsylvania in March, would allow intelligent design to be taught in public schools.

Dembski said the intent is for contributors to post about the intellectual issues and not about those that involve politics and public policy.

“One of the great things about the blog is that we are able to do an end run around the established media that in some cases have fixed ideas about what they want intelligent design to mean,” Dembski said. “We’ve had this experience where reporters know the story they want to tell: that we are crazy, right-wing fundamentalists who want to inject religion into science curriculum. I can do their lines at this point because I’ve heard it so often.”

The blog was conceived by Jay Richards, vice president and a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture, a program of the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is a public policy think tank that has worked to further understanding of intelligent design.

Richards said his inspiration came from reading blogs that specialize in news. “There is an enormous glut of information because of the Internet,” he said. “So there’s sort of a premium on [having a place that is] discerning what’s important and consolidating it.”

Figures on Web activity for the blog were not available. But Richards said that blog contributors have gotten plenty of e-mails, an indication that the blog is getting attention.

Unlike most blogs, however, Intelligent Design The Future does not let readers respond online to the posts.  Reed Cartwright, a contributor to the evolution blog called The Panda’s Thumb, said preventing readers from adding their comments to the online discussion about intelligent design, also known as ID, shows that those who created it are not interested in running an actual blog.

“If ID is the future, as the title of the blog advertises, can’t it withstand criticism?” said Cartwright, a doctoral candidate in genetics at the University of Georgia. “I think that it is ironic that a movement, which claims to want ‘more discussion’ about biology in schools, does not allow discussion [on their blog].”

In the blog’s defense, Richards explained that the ID contributors ruled out comments because the debate about intelligent design often becomes malicious. “We would have one post and 30 comments that are vitriolic,” he said.

Instead, the blog allows for “trackbacks,” which show that a comment about a post has been made on a separate blog. It appears below the post just as a normal comment would.

“We hope to elevate the tone of the discussion and the debate,” Richards said. “If we’re arguing, we’re actually going to be arguing about the ideas, not the personalities involved.”