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To decide whether or not intelligent design can be considered a science, two rather bigger questions must be answered. Namely first, what is science, and second, what is intelligent design?

There are hundreds of definitions of science floating around, but we can capture the essential differences between them that matter for our purposes with a couple of examples. The following two are similar to a pair mentioned by Michael Behe in his book "Darwin's Black Box".

1. Science is a game in which we try to explain what we see in the universe, insofar as we can, in terms of purely natural causes.

2. Science is an attempt to make true statements about the world by the use of certain methods.

If you pick definition one, then you will reject intelligent design as a science because a designer, whether he be a supernatural one or someone more mundane like your neighbor, is not a "natural" cause. However, if you do this, you must also acknowledge that you are forcing science to develop the wrong explanation for some processes if we really are observing processes in the universe that are designed. Also, because we know that many things around us were designed (by humans), you are also excluding the study of them as science, whether they be that of the archaeologist digging through the dirt looking for evidence of human civilization, or the biologist studying the latest pandemic virus in hopes of determining whether it was devised as a weapon. That being said, if you still prefer definition one, intelligent design is not a science, and you can stop reading now.

If you like definition two better, than we need to consider what these "certain methods" are, and what intelligent design is. There are, after all, plenty of people trying to make true statements about the world that we don't think are doing science. When Plato wrote The Republic he was trying to make true statements about the world but he was doing philosophy, not science.

What distinguishes science is that it is centered around observations of the natural world. Many textbooks will describe it as a sort of circle. We make an observation, then we develop a hypothesis to explain it, then we test that hypothesis, and repeat as necessary. If the hypothesis passes all our tests we tend to believe it, and if it fails one of them we look for another hypothesis. I think this description is largely correct.

What, then, is intelligent design? For a field this young and this discussed in the popular culture, definitions will vary

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