Abstract
The claims that intelligent design theories are not legitimately scientific and that such theories can carry no genuinely scientific content represent conventional anti-design wisdom. However, actually supports for such claims come to remarkably little and tend to implode under scrutiny. Furthermore, demands confronting design theories are often arbitrarily restricted to the realm of direct empirical consequences. The precise surface-level empirical upshot of design theories is, I think, still relatively minimal. But eh directly empirical level does not exhaust the substance of science, and design theories may bring to science deeper cognitive richness, broader conceptual resources, and more substantive anchors that a purely (methodologically) naturalistic science can achieve.