Intelligent design (
ID) is the
pseudoscientific view that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as
natural selection." Educators, philosophers, and the scientific community have demonstrated that ID is a religious argument, a form of
creationism which lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable
hypotheses. Proponents argue that it is "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins" that challenges the
methodological naturalism inherent in modern science, while conceding that they have yet to produce a
scientific theory. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the
Discovery Institute, a politically conservative
think tank based in the
United States. Although they state that ID is not creationism and deliberately avoid assigning a personality to the designer, many of these proponents express belief that the designer is the Christian deity.