You may be catching on. There is no way, not even in principle, that ID could be falsified, because we're free to postulate anything we want to about the hypothetical designer. ID has no explanatory power at all - absolutely any observation is consistent with it, since the designer is not restricted in any way.
However, as I and others have stated above, there are observations, which if they were ever made, would falsifiy standard biological evolution (out-of-place fossils, non-tree-like dna or protein based classifications, an intermediate between a bird and a mammal, etc ad infinitum). None of these observations has ever been made.
Another thing. The scientific theory allows us to make rather strong predictions, for example 'if a particulaar piece of dna is found in both people and orangutangs, it will also be found in chimps and gorillas.' This single statement is a huge number of potential falsifications. Can ID come up with something similar? How could it possibly, since it asserts nothing whatsoever about the hypothetical designer?
The above statement about people and apes has counter parts in other lineages, for example artiodactyls: 'if a particualr piece of dna is found in both pigs and whales, it will also be found in cows and hippopotomi' See section 4.7 in Plagiarized Errors
Sure. By analogy, suppose I have a CRM system (that's Customer Relationship Management to you non computer types.) This system lets a CSR (customer support representative) enter data about a customer into the system. For example, the ability to change address information. Now I can predict, absolutely, once I have examined the Siebal CRM, that the Clarify CRM and the Vantive CRM will also have this same functionality. Why is this? Because form follows function, in the sense that this functionality is needed, therefore it is written. Further, I can predict with confidence, once I have seen one ERP system, that any other ERP system will also have some form of order processing functionality.
Ergo, in fact, for ID I would predict exactly what you identify as true for TOE. Using your precise example, 'if a particulaar piece of dna is found in both people and orangutangs, it will also be found in chimps and gorillas', I would predict that for ID.
That's not necessarily correct. If I were to suggest an ID, it would fit the observations made in nature. Which is, that the code tends to be hacked to fit current needs, that copy/paste is used, and that bugs are introduced. Very, very much like software development as we know it. So, if I were to suggest a single "designer", I would suspect they are way overworked. I would, I think, suggest multiple "designers" and "coders" and suspect that some of the sub-contractors are not too hot at what they do, while others are brilliant. And I suggest that that explanation fits the observed results also.
And here is falsifiable statement for ID. I bet that if my (half-joking) statement is correct, somewhere in the DNA we will find some "comment" statements (maybe in the so-called "junk" DNA). So here you go. If no "comment" statement is ever found, then this half-joke ID theory has been falsified. So all that is required to disprove this half-joke ID, is to show that the "junk" DNA contains no coding comments.
Not correct. Who the designer is does not matter as to whether something was designed. We can look at a car and know it was designed by some human being without knowing the human beings name or the purpose of his particular design.
ID has no explanatory power at all - absolutely any observation is consistent with it
Not correct either. ID has a tremendous amount of explanatory power and I will give you an example of why it does. For many years after the discovery of DNA scientists kept looking for a cancer 'gene'. They never found it. However, as we learned a little more about how organisms work we realized that it was not a gene that caused cancer, but a process which was somehow not working properly. This process in many cases is the one which controls cell replication. A quite involved process which tells at what point a cell should replicate and at the same time tells the old cell (in older people of course) to commit suicide. So this shows that the Intelligent Design theory led to a solution which had not been looked at because of evolutionary theory insisting on randomness and denying design.