portray ID as a moderate position. Even Behe’s support is lukewarm; in 2005, he wrote that “my Intelligent Design colleagues who disagree with me on common descent have greater familiarity with the relevant science than I do” (Behe, 2005b). Dembski’s position is typical, accepting “some change in the course of natural history,” but believing “that this change has occurred within strict limits and that human beings were specially created” (Dembski, 1995). This is the standard position of an ID advocate. In May 2005, ID supporters on the Kansas Board of Education held hearings to support ID-friendly science standards. Mainstream scientists boycotted the hearings, but a series of pro-ID witnesses, mostly teachers and academics (but few professional biologists) testified in support of the standards. During cross-examination, only 2 of 19 witnesses accepted the common ancestry of humans and apes. One was an independent scholar who clarified that although he supported the Kansas standards, he was not an ID advocate; and the other was Behe. The rejection of evolution by the vast majority of ID witnesses at the Kansas hearings parallels the rejection of evolution by ID proponents in general.

Although the content of ID suggests that it is derived from creation science, the recently uncovered historical origin of ID illustrates this even more clearly.

The creation science movement reached its peak in the early 1980s. Equal time for evolution and creation science bills were proposed in at least 27 states in 1980 and 1981 (Scott, 2004). Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws mandating “equal time” for the “two models” of evolution and creation science. Arkansas Methodist minister Bill McLean and other plaintiffs, most of them professional clergy from various Christian denominations, brought suit against their state’s equal time law in federal district court, and the trial was held in December 1981. McLean v. Arkansas pitted a team of plaintiffs’ witnesses that included eminent scientists such as Francisco Ayala, Stephen Jay Gould, Harold Morowitz, and G. Brent Dalrymple against a team of creationist defense witnesses who were largely unknown in the world of science, and who had the impossible task of defending the scientific merits of a young earth and global flood.

McLean put creation science on trial, and creation science lost badly. In the January 1982 decision, the judge wrote that creation science was biblical literalist Christianity in disguise, and that to teach it would be to promote a sectarian religious view, which he held to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment of the Constitution (1982). The judge in McLean also noted a characteristic of creation science he termed a “contrived dualism” wherein evidence against evolution was considered to be