The public perception of intelligent design is that it is a scientifically specious, religiously motivated idea that seeks to explain away the notion of Darwinian evolution through magical thinking. Some incarnations of intelligent design can fairly be described as such.

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., with displays showing animatronic dinosaurs roaming through Eden, employs a pseudoscientific presentation of faith — and biblical text — as a counterweight to the voluminous scientific information supporting evolution.

But there are other alternative ideas that can explain the origin of life on Earth. One needn’t be actively religious, or even reject evolution, to consider the possibility of intelligent design. That intelligence could have originated not on some spiritual plane whose existence can never be proven but simply elsewhere in the cosmos.

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