Etymology

intelligent design

Today it means: The belief that biological life on Earth, or more broadly, the universe as a whole, was created by an intelligent agent (specified or unspecified) rather than being the result of undirected natural processes. Full definition →

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The story

Became a standard and widely promoted term in the 1987 draft of Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, as a repackaging of creationism after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against its teaching in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.