Then how do you try to show that the argument depends on religion? You point out that these guys also happen to be religious. They happen to believe in God as part of their religion, and they think the being they believe in is the same being the argument’s conclusion accepts.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how this shows that the argument is religious. All it shows is that some people think the designer happens to be the same being people believe in religiously. It doesn’t show that anyone accepting the argument need do so. It doesn’t show that those who think the argument is good do so because of their religion. It doesn’t show that the theoretical basis of the argument is religious. Nothing of that sort follows from the one piece of evidence you’ve presented.

Also, your last paragraph makes a category mistake. The ID argument is not about how questions. It’s about teleology. That’s why it’s long been called the teleological argument by philosophers. Scientists who ask what you refer to in the last paragraph are looking for how explanations, not why explanations. They want to know a process by which something came about. They don’t at all ask whether some being designed that process for a certain reason. One can believe in the same how process as standard contemporary evolution while thinking a designer designed it all for a reason, something Demsbki and Johnson both have not just acknowledged but insisted on. They aren’t getting at that question. They’re arguing that the best explanation is intent, not any particular process as to how that intent came about. It is thus a philosophical question, not a religious question, and philosophy has always been a significant part of the argumentation in science. Calling it religion massively misrepresents the argument.

This isn’t about whether ID arguments are good arguments. I happen to think there might be something to cosmological fine tuning arguments but am less impressed by the biological ones from people like Behe and Dembski. Nevertheless, I know a serious misrepresentation when I see one, and what you’ve claimed about ID here is simply not true. It’s hard for me to see it as anything but a political attempt to marginalize the argument to prevent it from cropping up in science classes by representing it as religion when it’s not. Someone completely non-religious could accept such an argument.

Yet, STILL, they keep using that tired old tactic on us…

It’s my guess, if we don’t destroy ourselves or get sent into another “Dark Age,” science will eventually tell us where we go when we die…