Many have written about this issue recently, therefore I will be brief.
Science, by definition, tends to be atheistic; that is, it denies the existence of any god who matters. To an atheistic scientist, one may posit the existence of a god or gods so long as that god does nothing related to the behavior of the material world. If your child is dying of an inexplicable malady, you don’t want some pious doctor to tell you that God is working a miracle and defying the laws of medicine. No, you would take your child to the atheist doctor down the hall whose attitude is “There must be some natural cause for this problem and I intend to figure it out and save your child’s life.” That would be the scientific approach.
But what if God did work a miracle? If he did, then science would be unable to respond to it correctly. For instance, if God were to create a man today, science would look at that man and see evidence of him being, say, thirty years old. But in fact the man isn’t thirty years old; he’s only one day old. The scientific method assumes that no god has messed with the material world and confused us.
“Intelligent design,” put simply, says that the universe bears undeniable evidence against the theory that it came into being through random processes. Evolutionism says that no god intervened to make the world the way it is. Why do evolutionists say that? Because “science” requires it to be so. To say that God did it would be to depart from the scientific method.
Therefore, even if God did do it, science requires the scientist to deny that God did it.
“Intelligent design” is as obvious as an eastern sunrise. Spiders did not learn to build webs through random processes, trial and error, and natural selection. Heck, I have an I.Q. above 120 and I can’t even keep track of my plumbing tools as well as a squirrel keeps track of the nuts she buried a year ago.
Most pundits do not understand the issues at stake here at all, and they don’t want to.