[js1138]

One need go no further than stating that the cosmos seems to bear the marks of design by an intelligent source...

The problem is that the appearance of design has never been denied. The source of the design is natural selection.

The function of theory in science is not to produce truth, but to suggest lines of research that can actually be carried out. Natural selection has been a fertile source of research proposals for 150 years. ID has yet to publish a proposal that is not already part of mainstream research.

[chronic_loser]

The function of theory in science is not to produce truth, but to suggest lines of research that can actually be carried out.>>

by whose dictum? You have made a very arbitrary statement that science is to be done within the confines and at least a practical (if not theoretical) closed system. You have thus substituted an arbitrarily chosen philosophical position as a bedrock for science itself. There is no intrinsic scientific reason to choose a closed system as the starting point for scientific inquiry, beyond the prejudices of those doing the theorizing.

By the way, I DON'T think you are being dishonest or deliberately obfuscating the issue, even though I believe you to be in grave error. Choices about how we sort data that are influenced by our view of the world are very seldom recognized as "choices." Rather, we just tend to think of them as "the way things are." What is worse, we don't tend to conciously choose our world view most of the time. We just adopt it from the culture and influences around us. Science has preened itself as some discipline that is immune from these influences because of the "objective" nature of the discipline. This is balderdash, of course. Every scientific discipline is replete with a whole gaggle of philosophical assumptions that are unverifiable using the scientific method.