How does one incorporate a reference to the supernatural in a scientific inquiry?
That is NOT what intelligent design theory is all about. We are NOT talking about a SUPERNATURAL designer. But a designer. Once one goes beyond nature into supernature you are beyond the realm of science. But ID scientists DO NOT make any assumptions about the nature of the designer but make the assumption that molecular machines appear to be designed - hence there is most likely a designer of some intelligence behind these machines. The designer may be dead - some being or beings who has died or the designer could be supernatural - a deity. But the nature of the designer is NOT what is at issue - it is whether molecular machines, DNA and its program are designed or not designed based on information theory and other scientific assumptions about when something is designed verses when something has come about by blind luck.
It's absolutely what's at issue. The people who are stridently shoving the ID garbage at us are not research scientists, they are religious types. I don't think they are contending (or would support the idea) that an ancient race of unfeeling super-machines created DNA.
Since they haven't offered a particle of evidence that ID is anything more than psuedo-intellectual wankery, all we have to consider is the nature of the alleged designer.
You have some gall bringing facts to bear in a thread like this...
;)
People have lost the distinction between primary and secondary causes. Cardinal Newman had no trouble with Darwin's theories since he conceded to science the field of secondary causes. But Huxley and others followed Kant and the German idealists in denying the knowability of primary causes. Dogmatically they insist that this is all we can know.
A lot of physicists speculate about an intelligent designer for the universe itself. The remarkable necessary precision of the various fundamental constants to give rise to an interesting universe can be dismissed by the strong anthropic principle or by assuming a designer, maybe even our distant progeny. Then of course, conjuring our universe would be child's play for a 4 dimensional being, we being a mere projection of images on a flat screen in time.