Origins of Intelligent Design

 I have just come across a very interesting article, The Evolution of Creationist Movements by Nicholas J. Matzke

One of the most interesting bits is this quote, by William J. Bennetta, president of The Textbook League and a longtime activist opposing pseudoscience in textbooks. He said this in 1988, shortly after the Edwards case that banned creation science:

Here are some of the things creationists will be doing most assiduously during the coming decade: [...] The creationists will produce a new version of the pseudoscience, and they will try to induce respectable secular publishers to issue books incorporating the new material. They will hope to use the books for validating their litany about teaching "all the evidence" and for validating the misinformation that they will be spreading among science teachers.

Because the term "creation-science" has been sullied most recently in Edwards v. Aguillard, the creationists' new pseudoscience will carry a new name, or perhaps several new names. Its content will be fully sterilized: it will avoid explicit supernaturalism, and it will speak not of any god but of a nebulous "intelligence" or "intelligent cause." It will be much more sophisticated than orthodox "creationscience" because it will shun created "kinds," a worldwide flood, and other topics that clearly point to episodes in the Bible. Its literature will avoid blatant references to the literature of orthodox "creation-science" and will be untainted by any obvious connections to fundamentalist ministries or to fundamentalist publishers.

Of course, we now know creationist did example this - the only detail he got wrong being that he suggests it would be called "intelligent cause", rather than "intelligent design".