There's nothing at all "Judaeo" about the intelligent design movement.
Except for the fact that the book of Genesis is included in the scriptures of both Jusaism and Christianity, there is no basis for using the phrase "Judaeo-Christian" with regard to ID -- and, funny thing: the leaders of the ID movement deny that they are Creationists.
Yeah, right...
Nonetheless:
Jewish creationism includes a continuum of views on aspects including the origin of life and the role of evolution in the formation of species as debated in the creation-evolution controversy. Generally, the major Jewish denominations accept evolutionary creationism or theistic evolution (the belief that some or all classical religious teachings about God and creation are compatible with some or all of the scientific theory of evolution) with the exception of certain Orthodox Jewish groups. The contemporary general approaches of Judaism, except some Orthodox traditions, are to not take the Torah as a literal text, but rather as a basis for Jewish belief and practice.
[found in the sidebar of this article in the Detroit Free Press, dated 8/28/05]
It is also useful to note that [a] most adherents of Orthodox Judaism send their children to private schools of their own founding; [b] in no case would a religious Jew seeks to impose his faith on anyone else.
ID uses the language of science to discredit science. It speaks of complexity, theory and observation, but its actions reveal it to be an ideology of simplicity, a rejection of theory, and a call to base our lives on a dictated fantasy.
Evolution is a vibrant field of human inquiry, ready to change whenever the next real observation is found. Intelligent design is a rigid ideology aimed directly at this one realm of human inquiry, but ready to attack others as well.
When a society shifts to ideology at the expense of actual facts, then pursuit of greater knowledge of our world ceases and persecution of those who deny the ideology is swift to follow.
The Jewish community can only ignore this danger at its own peril.
-- Arthur Lavin, M.D., FAAP, in the Cleveland Jewish News; full text here.
The scientific enterprise itself is rooted in Judaism. Professor Paul Davies, a renowned physicist, writes: "The Jews conceived of G-d as the Lawgiver. This G-d, being independent of, and separate from, His creation, imposed laws upon the physical universe from without." It never occurred to pagans to look for regularities in nature.
Judaism always believed in perceiving G-d through studying the natural world. This never meant "there is no scientific explanation for phenomena." Rather, it meant understanding that G-d was the One who decreed the laws of science in the first place. (Miracles are traditionally considered a last resort, something to shake people into realizing to look beyond the laws of nature for their source. Jews perceive G-d primarily in His role as lawmaker, not lawbreaker.)
-- Rabbi Nosson Slifkin, at Torah.org
