You can't demonstrate the Civil War happened except by exhibiting the evidence and asserting that it is foolish to deny it. The same applies to evolution. The evidence is there even if you choose to close your eyes. Event the advocates of ID -- Behe, Dembski and Denton -- accept the fact that evolution happened.
Ah, but it also doesn't follow that everything is explainable or explainable as the natural workings of a universe without a deity or deities. That's the main point of contention here...
But science is an activity that seeks natural explanations. Always has been.
The theory is that it's possible to distinguish that which has been intelligently designed from that which happened at random.
No one says evolution is random. Variation is random, but selection is not random. No one says life is a random glob of molecules. The argument is about the specific history. You do not have a theory unless you can produce a history that can be out to the test.
I never claimed it wasn't.
Event the advocates of ID -- Behe, Dembski and Denton -- accept the fact that evolution happened.
However, I believe at least some of them claim that evolution does not explain everything that has happened.
But science is an activity that seeks natural explanations. Always has been.
Are you saying that science would reject, out of hand, evidence that defies a natural explanation simply because considering it would be unscientific?
No one says evolution is random. Variation is random, but selection is not random.
Correct. But nature can only select that which mutates at random. If it can be shown that a biological feature could not arise through random nutation and natural selection, then it would suggest that something else is involved. That would be the proof of the theory. Just because ID advocates have not come up with a solid example does not mean that such an example does not exist, any more than the absence of a transitional evolutionary form in the fossil record means that it doesn't exist.
In realty, the evidence for either evolution or ID won't be crystal clear. It will be very much like looking at the evidence that the Civil War happened. You put all of the evidence together and decide what seems most plausible and probable. But it's a leap of faith either way.
Your opinions are biased by your interpretation of science -- that it must deal only in natural explanations. You assume that there are natural explanations for everything and therefore when confronted with an unknown, you simply assume that there is a natural explanation for it. Similarly, I suspect you look for natural explanations for things like coincidences, lucky breaks, etc. For you, if any possibility that it's natural means that you will believe that it's natural. But ultimately that's begging the question, not testing your theories. If you exclude any possibility of non-natural evidence or explanations, you'll be left with only a natural explanation, no matter how unlikely. But that doesn't really prove that the natural explanation is correct. It only proves that if you exclude all the evidence that contradicts your theory, there won't be any evidence that contradicts your theory.
A religious person looks at the unknown and things like coincidences and lucky breaks and might see the hand of God at work. They can't be certain, either, or prove it. But ultimately it's a matter of faith either way, that the unknown can be explained by the person's assumptions about how the universe works.
No one says life is a random glob of molecules. The argument is about the specific history. You do not have a theory unless you can produce a history that can be out to the test.
Why does it need to have a specific history? Do I need to know how Mount Rushmore was funded or why the sculptor wanted to carve it to prove that it was carved by the hands of a human being? You see that stuff all the time in archaeology -- features of a settlement are identified as being man made as opposed to being natural (with some fuzzy lines when dealing with fire pits and very primative tools) without necessarily knowing why an artifact was created or by whom.
What you are essentially doing here is going beyond the demands of science. You are trying to make ID comply with the structure of the theory of evolution. Either that, or you are fishing for a specific creation story so you can knock it down. Please go bait someone else if that's the case. I'm not a Biblical literalist.
FYI, some of them don't. Phillip Johnson, for instance, does not. Not sure about Denton and Dembski. They seem to vacilate between accepting it and rejecting it.
Behe for sure accepts its.