Discovery Institute isn’t calling for states to mandate the teaching of intelligent design in the science classes of our public education system, but neither should a biology teacher be forbidden to discuss it if she so chooses. One blogger’s intellectual journey through the writings of Discovery Institute senior fellow Stephen Meyer offers an engaging explanation of why:

Until about two months ago, I hadn’t read much material put out by the Discovery Institute. Their Center for Science and Culture is one of the main forces behind Intelligent Design. What little knowledge I had of them was based on what I would occasionally read in news articles and perhaps Panda’s Thumb. Then after reading one of my posts where I said that I don’t think ID is currently science, Jonathan Witt sent me a link to a Stephen C. Meyer article called “The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories.” To tell you the truth, when he sent it to me, I didn’t really plan on reading it because my brief skim of the article made me think that it was arguing for something that I already believed – that there isn’t anything inherently unscientific about the idea of an intelligent designer (supernatural or not). What ended up happening was that I read a different article by Meyer and Michael Newton Keas called The Meanings of Evolution. From there I went on to read most of the articles by Meyer on the CSC website, including the one that Witt had originally sent me. What I came to realize was that the ID position is deeply misunderstood by a lot of people.

The full post is here.