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"Now, you are welcome to defend a creation theory/story if you choose - but should science set out to disprove all telic possibilities with stories that “must” be natural regardless of the findings?"

Science can ONLY deal with natural causes. Supernatural causation can never be part of a scientific theory. You say *regardless of the findings*, but there have been NO findings that support supernatural causes.

"Dr. David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard seems to think that the purpose of science is to create stories/theories in regard to the origin of life that – well, as he says, ‘’my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.”

This is the way EVERY theory in science works, without exception. Why single out Dr. Liu for starting from the same point that all science starts from?

"Myth 1: The theory of intelligent design is a modern version of Creationism.
Fact: The theory of intelligent design goes back at least as far as classical Greece and it has been debated in nearly every century since then."

It's just a very OLD version of creationism. I'm not sure who says it is modern.

"As for the idea that science could lead to atheism, Newton dismissed it brusquely: "Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could [not] produce [the] variety of things" found on our diverse and ever-surprising world…"

Yet his theories assumed no supernatural causes. That he was a creationist just means he believed as most everybody did before Darwin. He was also a Unitarian who denied the divinity of Christ; should Christians look to him for theological arguments just because he was a scientific genius?

…Suppose I were a super-genius molecular biologist, and I invented some hitherto unknown molecular machine, far more complicated and marvelous than the bacterial flagellum. Suppose further I inserted this machine into a bacterium, set this genetically modified organism free, allowed it to reproduce in the wild, and destroyed all evidence of my having created the molecular machine. Suppose, for instance, the machine is a stinger that injects other bacteria and explodes them by rapidly pumping them up with some gas (I'm not familiar with any such molecular machine in the wild), thereby allowing the bacteria endowed with my invention to consume their unfortunate prey…

Now let's ask the question, If a Darwinist came upon this bacterium with the novel molecular machine in the wild, would that machine be attributed to design or to natural selection? When I presented this example to David Sloan Wilson at a conference at MIT two years ago, he shrugged it off and remarked that natural selection created us and so by extension also created my novel molecular machine. But of course this argument won't wash since the issue is whether natural selection could indeed create us. What's more, if Darwinists came upon my invention of a novel molecular machine inserted into a bacterium that allows it to feed on other bacteria, they wouldn't look to design but would reflexively turn to natural selection. But, if we go with the story, I designed the bacterial stinger and natural selection had nothing to do with it. Moreover, intelligent design would confirm the stinger's design whereas Darwinism never could. It follows that a design-theoretic framework could account for biological facts that would forever remain invisible within a Darwinian framework. It seems to me that this possibility constitutes a joint test of Darwinism and intelligent design that strongly supports intelligent design -- if not as the truth then certainly as a live possible theoretical option that must not be precluded for a priori philosophical reasons like naturalism…
-William Dembski