Over at the Thinking Christian, Tom Gilson, a proponent of intelligent design, asks: “Who Defines ID?” My goal in this essay is not to define ID, but to inquire into its origins. For Tom and ID supporters to talk about ID in the present, it first had to be possible for Tom to invoke the phrase “intelligent design.” How did “intelligent design” become possible to talk about?

Using resources available at most university library’s in the USA, I searched the New York Times and Washington Post historical databases for uses of the phrase “intelligent design.” I found that the first reported uses of the phrase appeared in 1875. Dr. Asa Gray, a devout, orthodox Christian since childhood and professor of botany and Darwinian evolution at Harvard University used the phrase “intelligent design” in a lecture to the students of the Yale Theological Seminary. [For more on Dr. Gray see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Gray] The lecture was commented on in two Times articles.1

Dr. Gray’s use of the phrase was first reported by the New York Times in February of 1875.

But Dr. Gray has always maintained, even more clearly than Darwin, that the great condition for the ‘survival of the fittest,’ that is, ‘variation,’ was not at all explained by this theory. As a botanist, no one has had greater opportunities of studying the mysteries of variation, and he has different times, declared that to him variation does not always seem an accident, but often ‘guided in certain lines,’ as if by an intelligent power…. But Dr. Gray does not rest his pronounced faith on Theism on the intelligent design manifested in the mysterious variations of animals and plants from the ancestral type. He takes a broader view. He holds that, referring back all the countless varieties of vegetable and animal life to a few primeval types, from which they have been derived by the processes of inheritance, variation, and natural selection, does not at all lessen the probability of an intelligent force at the beginning of the series.

The next month it appeared again in an article:

Dr. Gray also shows, what most religious believers now admit, that Darwinism itself is perfectly consistent with theism. He even finds in it a confirmation of the faith in immortality; that is, that the analogy of nature teaches everywhere ‘the survival of the fittest,’ and that the soul would naturally thus survive its bodily manifestation. The force of the whole argument is, in our judgment, somewhat weakened by its close – the endeavor to reconcile the doctrine of evolution with Christianity. It were enough, even to a theological audience, to demonstrate the harmony of evolution with a belief in intelligent design.

Gray’s lectures were in support of a book, Natural Science and Religion, which appeared that same month. The phrase “intelligent design,” interestingly, does not appear in that text. You can see for yourself here.

Almost two decades later, during the 1890s, the phrase was used again in a couple of different articles.2 One article referenced an ongoing competition between readers to offer an “extirpation of the mosquito,” which lead to a discussion of the teleological significance of the mosquito because of the winning entry. Talking about the teleological argument, the author writes:

“Although the evidences of intelligent design in creation are often more visible in reation itself than they are in the arguments by which that design is sought to be pointed out and explained, yet it is frequently the case that they are even more confused and dim than might be desired when the object is to form a logical system that shall prove acceptable to the world at large and satisfy alike the minds, of, Mr. Chauncey M. Depew and Mr. T. V. Powderly; the late J. S. Mill and Gen. Booth of the Salvation Army.”

And again during the 1890s, when Dr. Stafford preached a sermon on the manifestation of God in Reason, Conscience, and in the Heart of Man, the phrase appeared. Dr. Stafford asked:

“What is there beyond? What is this life which never dies, which vivifies in the springtime and yet does not perish in the autumn – a power which makes generation after generation to spring up and groweth not old? Of this something beyond nature men are conscious, but they refuse to name it. With them it is unknowable, indefinite. But there is intelligent design in nature. Unbelief formerly denied design: but now, since the progress of science depends upon the natural law, design can no longer be denied”

So, what do these news articles indicate about the phrase “intelligent design”? It is a term that emerged about three quarters through the 19^th century, about 16 years after Darwin’s seminal text, Origin of Species, was published. It was coined by a man who followed both Christ and Darwin and saw no problem with combining the two systems of thought and action. It is also apparent that early on after the invention of “intelligent design” by Dr. Gray and its distribution by the Times and the Post, it became a matter of criticism. In particular, Dr. Gray parted company with Darwinists and claimed that all variations in plant and animal life could not be explained by evolution. Rather, he argued that the wide birth of plant and animal variations were designed by an “intelligent force at the beginning of the sequence” of life. Then as now, critics saw the “intelligent design” argument as unclear and teleological. Finally, based on the news articles, it is clear that Protestant preachers rather quickly took up and supported the “intelligent design” argument in the pulpit. And, like Gray, these supportive preachers indicated that there were no problems with combing faith in Christ with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Supportive pastors and lay Protestants continue in this vein.

According to Wikipedia, it was in response to the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards vs. Aguillard on the separation of church and state that “intelligent design” appeared in the high school biology text book, Of Pandas and People.  

The Discovery Institute was founded in 1990 as a nonprofit educational organization based on the Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis and operated as a branch of the theologically, politically, and economically conservative Hudson Institute.  Several more books were published during the 1990s and the Discovery Institute gradually became the organizational hub for much of the “intelligent design” supporters.  

Particularly important during this period was the 1996 editorial published in the NY Times by Michael J. Behe.  In it, Behe announces that Darwin was being put “under the microscope.”  Following along a similar line of thought originally marked out a little over a century before by Dr. Gray, Behe says:

“the complex design of the cell has provoked me to stake out a minority view among scientists on the question of what caused evolution.  I believe that Darwin’s mechanism doesn’t explain much of what is seen under a microscope.   Cells are simply too complex to have evolved randomly; intelligence was required to produce them.”  

By the late 1990s and on into the 2000s, articles in the NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution published articles relating to “intelligent design” and its supporters’ legal, cultural, financial, and political struggles to have their claims taken seriously and to have their ideas implemented in classrooms, textbooks, and school districts around the USA. 

This process culminated in the 2006 Supreme Court case, Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District, which challenged the teaching of “intelligent design” in high school biology. Currently, there is a growing list of scientific societies and organizations that explicitly reject “intelligent design.” These organizations, in contrast to Dr. Gray a little over 100 years ago, see theism and evolution as incompatible.

1. 1. Science and Religion.” New York Times 19 March 1875; “A Scientific ‘Confession of Faith.’” New York Times 22 February 1875.
2. 2. “Mosquitoes and Teleology.” New York Times 21 September 1890; “God’s Existence Manifest.” The Washington Post 31 May 1897.