The Intelligent Design movement, which began in the early 1990s, is an organized campaign promoting a Neo-Creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. Intelligent design is the controversial conjecture that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a naturalistic process such as natural selection. The overall goal of the movement is "to defeat materialism" and the "materialist world view" as represented by evolution, and replace it with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

The Intelligent Design movement's hub is the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian Stickers think tank, and its Center for Science and Culture (CSC). The CSC counts most of the leading Intelligent Design advocates and authors among its fellows or officers, notably, Phillip E. Johnson, its program advisor. As one of the most prolific authors in the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson is the architect of the movement's Wedge strategy and the Teach the Controversy campaign.

The movement's de facto legal arm is the Thomas More Law Center, which has played a central role in defending against legal objections to intelligent design being taught in public school science classes, which are generally brought on First Amendment grounds. The center has also participated as a plaintiff to remove legal barriers to the teaching of Intelligent Design as science. A similar legal foundation, Quality Science Education for All (QSEA), has litigated on behalf of the movement. Though much smaller in scale than the Thomas More Law Center, QSEA has in its first year of existence brought no fewer than 3 separate lawsuits to further the movement's agenda. Critics have suggested that QSEA, were it to continue its pattern of litigation, could be considered a vexatious litigant.

The Intelligent Design movement consists primarily of a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public and that of the popular media, and an aggressive lobbying campaign directed at policymakers and the educational community which seeks to undermine public support for teaching evolution while cultivating support for what the movement terms "intelligent design theory." These are both largely funded and directed by the Discovery Institute and conducted across a wide spectrum, from the national to the grassroots levels. The movement's near-term goal is greatly undermining or eliminating altogether the teaching of evolution in public school science, and with the long-term goal of "renewing" American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian values. Intelligent design is central and necessary for this agenda as described by the Discovery Institute: "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

The movement's Teach the Controversy campaign is designed to portray evolution as "a theory in crisis" and leave the scientific establishment looking closed-minded, that it is attempting to stifle and suppress new discoveries supporting Intelligent Design that challenge the scientific status quo. This is made with the knowledge that it's unlikely many in the public can or will consult the current scientific literature or contact major scientific organizations to verify Discovery Institute claims and plays on undercurrents of anti-intellectualism and distrust of science and scientists that can be found in particular segments of American society. In doing this, the movement claims that it is confronting the limitations of scientific orthodoxy, and a secular, atheistic philosophy of Naturalism. The Intelligent Design movement has attracted considerable press attention and pockets of public support, especially among conservative Christians in the US.

According to critics of the intelligent design movement, the movement's purpose is political rather than scientific or educational. They claim the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious worldview that undergirds it" [3] and call intelligent design an attempt to recast religious dogma in an effort to reintroduce the teaching of biblical creationism to public school science classrooms and the movement as an effort to reshape American society into a theocracy starting with education and science. As evidence they cite the Discovery Institute's political activities, its' Wedge strategy, and statements made by leading Intelligent Design proponents.

The mainstream scientific community's position, as represented by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education, is that Intelligent Design is not science, but creationist pseudoscience.

Richard Dawkins, biologist and professor at Oxford University, compares "Teach the controversy" with teaching flat earthism, perfectly fine in a history class but not in science. "If you give the idea that there are two schools of thought within science, one that says the earth is round and one that says the earth is flat, you are misleading children.

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