[kimtom]

“...are supposedly engaged in science ..”

Are you saying you cannot question a theory?? or adapt it to your own???
scientist do this often.

Is criticizing a theory unacceptable?/ That is what theory is about...to be tested.

[MrB]

Disallowing of criticism of a theory should be a red flag that the theory is a justification for a belief system - to edify underlying assumptions that have no basis otherwise.

[The_Reader_David]

No, criticizing a theory on the basis of a priori probability estimates, which is what ID folk, do is not science: a priori probability estimates are neither falsifiable nor verifiable.

Look, I'm sympathetic to ID, but it needs to be done right. The ID folk are right to consider biology as a system to which complexity theory can be applied -- this is something the neo-Darwinists, and especially the polemical materialists overlook, that the DNA/RNA/protein system is a massive computational system to which algorithmic complexity theory applies. But a scientific theory of intelligent design begins with a general scientific theory of intelligence, not intelligence as, itself, a "black box".

A critique of neo-Darwinism based on naive notions of randomness, which is at the base all ID as expounded by Behe et al. has offered, is not to the point. We know on the basis of work on genetic algorithms that a designed system whose internal workings are based on the Darwinian paradigm can, through a partially stochastic process, produce novel complex subsystems. What's more most "random" mutation is not flipping a base-pair here or there, but moving an "repurposing" larger bits of genetic code that were already "field-tested".

In the end, the whole "crevo" debate is quite frankly stupid. It is based on two false assumptions shared by literalist six-day creationists, rabid atheistic materialists, and everyone else who wants to argue that creation and evolution are incompatible:

• That a system for which our best model is stochastic is, in fact, governed by "random chance" in the hard philosophical sense of randomness. (Manifestly false: our best model of futures markets, which are set up by intentional, intelligent actors and in which the dynamics is created by intentional, intelligent actors is the Black-Scholes model, which involves stochastic differential equations.)
• That a system which at the micro-level in fact involves randomness is not the result of intelligent intentional action, and does not produce designed results. (Manifestly false: any archeologist finding a large piece of annealed or hardened metal will conclude that the metal is part of an artifact, yet both annealing and hardening are accomplished by a sequence of thermal -- and thus at a micro-level random -- processes.)

On the basis of these assumptions, the polemical creationist, firmly believing (as I also do) that God created the universe and all that is in it, biological diversity and human nature included, reasons that this cannot have been done by a process that looks from within the created universe like neo-Darwinism because that would involve stochastic elements, and thus categorically rejects Darwinism. On the basis of these assumptions, the polemical materialist, firmly believing that the Darwinian paradigm correctly describes the source of biological diversity and all the properties of living things, human beings included, goes on to categorically reject the existence of any intentional actor (traditionally God) behind the process.

I commend to everyone's attention Alexander Kalomiros's The Six Dawns for a very satisfying resolution of the false contradiction between the Biblical account of creation and the modern scientific account. Of course, one has to be willing to read Genesis the way the Fathers of the Church read it, rather than under the assumption that it "is literally true", which seems as near as I can make out to mean "communicates truth when read as if it were written by and for post-'Enlightenment' rationalists."