Abstract

The great struggle about Intelligent Design which has been fighted in the U.S.A. and elsewhere during the last few decades does not contain any particular philosophical originality. A survey of the ID Movement shows that the nostalgia of Paley's design argument, as put forward by Philipp E. Johnson, Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski and many other ingenious theorists, provides little more than a restatement in modern dress of a traditional and rather discredited teleological proof. The opening of Darwin's "black boxes" by biochemistry, genetic information and human genome mapping seems to be a rather inoffensive weapon when turned against contemporary evolutionary thought. The nemesis of ID assault on the "Darwinian dogma" has proved to be inevitable not only from a scientific and philosophic viewpoint, but even in the light of some more prudent theological attitudes of mind preferring a traditional compromise between evolution and religious thought.