Do peer-reviewed scientific journals reject articles that propose intelligent design, regardless of merit?

Question

Members of the intelligent design (ID) movement, when responding to arguments that journal articles don't support ID, claim that peer-reviewed scientific journals typically reject articles critical of the theory of evolution which propose some form of ID, regardless of the papers' scientific merit.

Dr. Lee Spetner, a physicist known for arguing against the theory of evolution saying mutations must be guided by an outside intelligence, made the claim thus:

Since they [evolutionists] control the literature in evolution, they reject papers that seriously criticize it. Many authors have attempted to publish such papers and they have been rejected, not because they are flawed, but for tangential reasons. I have submitted such papers; one was rejected for "not being of sufficient interest", and another was rejected for "not being sufficiently focused." So they love to use the catch that objections such as mine to neo-Darwinian theory "have not been published in peer refereed journals."

Similarly, there was a controversy surrounding an ID journal article written by Dr. Stephen Meyer.

While even according to the Discovery Institute there are several peer-reviewed journal articles that offer various criticisms of the theory of evolution in favor of ID, this doesn't necessarily speak to the proportion of such articles that were rejected, and even among those, the biological science journal articles don't explicitly propose ID and typically just question a particular aspect of current evolutionary theory.

Is there in fact an unfair standard imposed upon ID proponents to keep them out of the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Answer 1

The American Astronomical Society says, "intelligent design is not science", and "it fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses".

The American Psychological Association "rejects intelligent design as scientific", saying it lacks "a means of testing it that passes scientific muster".

The American Geophysical Union calls it an "untestable belief and, therefore, cannot qualify as a scientific theory".

The United States National Academy of Science says, "creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science".

The American Association for the Advancement of Science says that "whether there is an intelligent designer is a matter of religious faith rather than a scientifically testable question".

An editorial from Nature says, "Because it invokes a supernatural origin for something one cannot yet explain, and because it does not generate testable hypotheses and cannot be subjected to empirical inquiry, ID is not science".

This characterization of intelligent design as "not science", or "not scientific" is widespread amongst the scientific community. Here is a more complete list of this rejection by scientific societies.

Science journals tend to not include papers on non-scientific topics. This is their agenda. This is one factor directing their control over the literature.

For example:

• Articles in Nature must be "of extreme importance to scientists in the specific field".
• Science says that they are "committed to bringing the best peer-reviewed scientific work to publication as quickly as possible".
• PLOS ONE requires that "the study presents the results of primary scientific research".
• The Royal Society allows "articles in any area of the physical sciences".

Whether or not these standards are fair is a question of opinion, and off-topic for this site.

I have not found evidence that exclusion of intelligent design in scientific journals is due to dislike or that dislike of a topic is a criteria for exclusion by any journal.