ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the surface level of debate: Intelligent Designs (ID's) understanding of design and evolution as competitive explanations. It argues that the ID literature actually also contains the seeds for an approach reconciling design and evolution. The chapter also analyses what the debate between ID and theistic evolutionism tells us about ID's overall approach to reconciling science and religion. The ID movement's critique of theistic evolutionism become easier to understand and criticize when brought into dialogue with defences of the compatibility of Darwinian evolutionary theory and belief in God. Proponents of ID generally emphasize the importance of scientific evidence for defending theistic belief in creation against naturalism. Theistic evolutionism does not need to be fideism, though it can also be fideism. Dembski's argument that ID is required to counter the atheists' use of evolutionary science as an argument against religious belief is problematic for related reasons.
