The
intelligent design movement is a
neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of
intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the
universe and of
living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as
natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the
lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in
high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it. The movement arose out of the previous
Christian fundamentalist and
evangelistic creation science movement in the
United States, and is driven by a small group of proponents. The overall goal of the intelligent design movement is to overthrow
materialism and
atheism. Its proponents believe that society has suffered "devastating" cultural consequences from adopting materialism and that science is the cause of the decay into materialism because it seeks only natural explanations, and is therefore atheistic. They believe that the
scientific theory of
evolution implies that humans have no spiritual nature, no moral purpose, and no intrinsic meaning. They seek to "reverse the stifling dominance of the
materialist worldview" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with
Christian and
theistic convictions."