A big problem with Intelligent Design is that it is a dead end street. There is no way to cross examine, debate, argue or refute with the idea of design, because any designer is uncooperative with providing information.
Science works on the Cartesian principle that an experiment can be discreet. That is, an intelligent person can design an experiment to test a hypothesis, involving *only* controllable elements within the experiment. It is just as important to disallow elements outside of the experiment that may invisibly manipulate it, unless they can be accounted for as variables.
Take as example the theory that “table salt dissolves in a significantly larger quantity of fresh water”. The theory is carefully phrased to take into account just one type of salt, and one type of water, in a suitable proportion. Other factors, such as temperature, pressure, and other potential variables are ignored, because they are assumed to be “normal”.
When the table salt is added to the water, it can either dissolve or not dissolve as the two potential outcomes of the experiment. If it does something other than that, in “normal” conditions, unless an unaccounted for variable is found, something is “wrong” with the experiment.
At no time does the idea that some entity intended that salt should dissolve in water matter. It is unimportant to the closed experiment. As such it can be ignored.
The same applies to the existence of life. Substantial observational evidence exists that development happened. Whether or not it was intended to have happened does not matter, in any way, shape or form. Even speculation that it did, or not, does not matter to the final outcome of the observation.
So why is the debate happening at all? Those who argue for Intelligent Design are being disingenuous. Before Intelligent Design, they argued that the world was created in 4004 B.C., because a Protestant Irish Bishop, named Ussher, used some flawed Biblical calculation to guess that is when it happened. Then people who weren’t even part of his religion adopted it out of ignorance.
So even from the point of view of religious scholarship they were wrong. But they were so adamant in this belief that they fought against scientific principles that had nothing to do with their religion, insisting that a “literal interpretation” from another religion must be accurate. And for a time, they were politically powerful enough to enforce this ignorance.
Eventually, it became so untenable to advance this idea that they decided to rename it, and adopt pseudo-scientific reasoning to steal the credibility of scientific reasoning, and here we find ourselves today.
Does this mean that Intelligent Design didn’t happen? No. But it does mean that whether or not it did happen, it still is unscientific, and has no place, by itself or shared, being taught in a science classroom, any more than gospel singing belongs in a science classroom.
This also does not mean that the theory of evolution is correct. But as it follows the rules of science, it *does* fit in the science classroom. If it does not follow the rules of science, it does not, either. And this is not nit-picky. If it mostly follows the rules of science, it still belongs more than if it doesn’t follow the rules of science at all.
And by definition, Intelligent Design does not.
What a load of crap. Science routinely checks for “intelligent design.” When forensic scientists test for evidence of a murder, they are testing for the “intelligent design” of a death — as opposed to an accidental cause.
Granted, the test for ID of life is more complicated, but it is based on the same basic principles.
By the way, the notion that the first living cell came to be by random chance cannot be contradicted by any scientific test. Think about it. How could any test possibly prove that the first living cell could NOT have fallen into place by random chance? It would be like proving that random winds never wrote the entire Gettysburg Address on the sands of the Saraha desert. Do you agree then that abiogenesis is unscientific?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
One way that intelligent design might impinge upon science is if the designer is "supernatural", thereby violating (in actual fact, not merely as a potential theoretical construct) the principle of "uniformity of causes in a closed system".
If and only if, a supernatural intelligent agent acts "hands off" of the system to within at most a small perturbation, can science proceed with assurance of being veridical. (And no, I don't want to get started on models asymptotically resemble reality as they are refined.)
All I mean is, if an angel or whatever can arbitrarily screw around with your experiment, then it's not much use performing them, unless you have good enough reason to believe that it won't happen very often, and that the angels don't interfere enough outside of the lab to destroy the predictive power of the experiments.
So to make science possible, most agree to dispense with supernatural agents; and empirically, it works for most modeling and prediction most of the time.
The problem is, the plural of anecdotes is not data; but on the other hand, the plural -- or even the singular of anecdotes, need not guarantee falsehood.
So the inference that "since the model's predictions are empirically sound, this disproves the supernatural" does not hold.
Cheers!