Why intelligent design isn't.

The New Yorker's Fact section has a good article this issue about the problems with Intelligent Design.

Why intelligent design isn't. (by H. Allen Orr)

If you've been convinced by Behe in Darwin's Black Box that I.D. is worth considering, I really think you should read this article and rethink the issue.

The whole article is very good, but I want to quote a section toward the end that highlights how intelligent design proponents view this as a political issue and not an issue of science. (this paragraph comes after a discussion of how I.D. has not made any nontrivial predictions or aided in the pursuit of science in any way) (The Discovery Insitutue is one of the major groups pushing I.D. upon the world)

In 1999, a document from the Discovery Institute was posted, anonymously, on the Internet. This Wedge Document, as it came to be called, described not only the institute’s long-term goals but its strategies for accomplishing them. The document begins by labelling the idea that human beings are created in the image of God “one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.” It goes on to decry the catastrophic legacy of Darwin, Marx, and Freud—the alleged fathers of a “materialistic conception of reality” that eventually “infected virtually every area of our culture.” The mission of the Discovery Institute’s scientific wing is then spelled out: “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” It seems fair to conclude that the Discovery Institute has set its sights a bit higher than, say, reconstructing the origins of the bacterial flagellum.