“This definition would preclude the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and even evolutionist speculation.”
Why? Extraterrestials would not be supernatural. And evolutionist speculation, why would that be affected?
The difference between science and ID is that science never says that trying to understand something is too difficult if we just rely on natural forces to explain it, so we’ll just throw up our hands and say it must be supernatural. That sort of thinking would have left science where it was in the Middle Ages.
Why? Extraterrestials would not be supernatural.
True, in that sense. But scientists searching for extraterrestrial life are searching for signs of intelligence in radio waves, (non-random patterns, etc.), yet scientists dismiss, out of hand, the manifest evidence of intelligence or intelligent agency in DNA coding, for example, or irreducibly complex natural mechanism.
And evolutionist speculation, why would that be affected?
Evolutionary theory consists almost entirely of speculation regarding the nature and cause of inherently unobservable past phenomena. Evolutionists supposedly derive cause from effect. To determine such causation, scientists must make metaphysical assumptions (that natural laws have operated uniformly forever, etc.), assumptions which fall outside the domain of empiricism.
The difference between science and ID is that science never says that trying to understand something is too difficult if we just rely on natural forces to explain it, so we’ll just throw up our hands and say it must be supernatural.
No! ID is simply the recognition of intelligent agency when its effects are observed. Suppose, for example, that you were exploring a jungle and came upon a library. Would it be reasonable to believe that this library was constructed by intelligent beings at some time, or that the wind blew the library together at random?
Similarly, it is unreasonable to believe that the library's worth of information contained and encoded in human DNA simply "blew together" by chance or by "natural selection," a term with absolutely no explanatory power in this domain. (This problem is recognized by evolutionists, like Dawkins, who propose that aliens "seeded" human life on this planet. But this "solution" merely pushes the problem back to another planet.)
That sort of thinking would have left science where it was in the Middle Ages.
You have it exactly wrong. Buridan's impetus theory followed directly on the Church's dogmatic teaching of "creation from nothing." Newton built on Buridan's theory. It's no accident that science suffered stillbirth's everywhere except in Christendom.