Referring to Francis Crick's bizarro theory that some form of primordial life was shipped to the earth billions of years ago by extra-terrestrials, Yaakov Menken writes:
What [Crick] proposed is, of course, Intelligent Design without a Divine designer.No. Not at all.
Per Wikkipedia: "Intelligent Design is the controversial assertion that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, not an unguided process such as natural selection."
In other words, ID teaches that God guides evolution, and that every outcome is the result of God's will. But this isn't what Crick thought. Crick accepted natural selection, and he accepted the idea of life evolving via an "unguided process." Rather, Crick (like me, incidently) could not conceive of live evolving from non-living chemical. He overcame that obstacle with the alien-seeding idea; once that obstacle was overcome he had no further need for a Designer.