I can't prove what I'm about to say, but it's my general suspicion that one of the worst things that happened to the Western intellectual world was that it permitted the flourishing of the notion of "intelligent design". I vaguely remember this notion getting a start in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was getting through high school, and as the chart perhaps shows, the idea only gained popularity after that.
What's "intelligent design"? It was a fanatical Christian reaction to humiliation on the subject of evolution and "young Earth creationism". Growing up with a science-nerd father and science-nerd friends and the play "Inherit the Wind" on the public-school curriculum, I believed in childhood that hardcore Christian creationists‚ i.e. the people who insisted that the Biblical Genesis narrative was literally true and therefore a refutation of scientific consensus on geology and biology, had been defeated and destroyed. Science™ had won out over goofy Christian ideology...except, it didn't.
"Intelligent design" was the creationists' compromise, and I suspect that it's been a highly successful and insidious one: they switched from baldfaced assertion of the literal truth of scriptural creation mythology to a subtler plan of corrupting scientific inquiry with religious doctrines. Believers in "intelligent design" claimed that biology itself proved the existence of a Creator, and that it was somehow possible through scientific inquiry to demonstrate that complex living organisms could only exist so long as they were the products of "intelligent design". Creationists had already been experimenting with arguments of this sort, e.g. by pretending for example that structures like wings or eyes couldn't possibly be explained by any sensible incremental process. "How could a half-functional eye work? Of what use is a partial wing?" (As it turns out, both of these things confer clear evolutionary advantages, but creationists are good at ignoring counterexamples.) The purported "theory of intelligent design", which was falsely presented to the public as though it were a full-fledged theoretical competitor to evolutionary biology, claimed that rigorous examination of biological structures couldn't help but reveal the presence of a Creator.
And...they won. They got their way, not the least because the very word "theory" has always been fatally muddled in Western discourse. In popular usage, "theory" means "hypothesis", i.e. an unproven postulate or speculation, and thus "evolution is just a theory" has gained a solid foothold in the popular imagination. One "theory" (i.e. one speculation, to use the popular definition of "theory") is worth no more than any other, and therefore "intelligent design" means as much as evolutionary biology. Teach the controversy! etc.
I always thought the notion of "intelligent design" was horrifying—not because I feel threatened by the notion itself, but because promoting it as a scientific theory was clearly dishonest. How could one possibly "research" such a thing? From the bits that I saw, it seemed a simple matter of calculated despair, i.e. the purported ID "researcher" would simply find something complicated enough as to defy immediate explanation, and therefore conclude that God must have done it rather than inquire further. Whatever that is, it's not science, and yet from what I can tell, it was never decisively refuted. Christian fanatics were allowed to have their own branch of false biology to themselves, and I daresay that's encouraged the growth of an entire substratum of reactionary-Christian pseudointellectual disciplines. Just as there's "Christian rock" and "Christian movies" and "Christian gaming", there's "Christian psychology" and "Christian biology" and other ideologically warped versions of legitimate academic disciplines.
Maybe such a process has been unavoidable—maybe it's been impossible to fight it. How can one actually refute faith that's disguised itself as science? What possible logical arguments—arguments that the Christian faithful would feel bound to accept—can be marshalled against "intelligent design" or any other pseudoscience that's covertly rooted in fanatical Christian faith?
~Χαρά