Intelligent Design: Science or Philosophy?

I think that the real controversy about intelligent design concerns whether this is properly thought of as a scientific hypothesis or as a philosophical or metaphysical explanation. Those who are involved in the intelligent design movement (like William Dembski and Phillip Johnson and others) definitely thought of it as a scientific hypothesis, and they would point out that there are a number of fields of science, such as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or archeology, where one is allowed to infer the presence of intelligent design as the best explanation for some given phenomenon. And so they ask, "Why would this be illicit or excluded in the field of biology?" So they think of it as a scientific inference. I'm not so sure about that. As a philosopher, I'm inclined to think of the inference to intelligent design as a philosophical inference. The nice thing about that is you're not then competing with contemporary science; you're not proposing an alternative theistic scientific theory. Rather, you're saying that the best data of current science allow us to infer philosophically that there is some sort of a cosmic intelligence or designer behind this, whether it be the fine-tuning of the universe or the origin of life or the evolution of biological complexity. You don't have to pose yourself as an alternative to what science has to say, but rather as philosophically reflecting on the data and making a philosophical inference. That's the way I like to think of intelligent design.