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The author is "she", and she is extracting her comments from the arguments made in court regarding this Kansas case. If you find her observations illogical well, then, you cannot make them the basis of your decisions ... but a judge or judges did.

As for naturalism being evidence based...well, the starting point of naturalism is an assumption that nature created itself. There simply is no where else to go in a circle. Once you fly off the circle you are in the "no man's land" of "non science" as defined by Darwinist naturalists.

There has become no body of thought more intolerant of contrary evidence than Darwinist naturalists. That is why their articles are passionate, contain anger (cloaked in ridicule/humor/sarcasm). Devolving into ad hominen attacks on the finders of such evidence and scorn of their very efforts. ("Discovery Institute..a bunch of carpet baggers from Seattle".... etc)

That is why the author made the very cogent insight that Darwinist naturalists have defined any alternatives to their theories as ...unscientific. In many cases, they simply deign to examine or debate or even rebut the evidence .... because it is "unscientific".

That's why they were no-shows in the original case in Kansas. That's why no biologist, why anti-ID proponent Richard Dawkins, refused to take on Information Theorist George Gilder in a face-to-face ID debate (link I posed in a previous thread).

Avoidance, professional shunning, does not suggest an evidence based disciplinary approach. Darwinist naturalists scorn anyone of any credentials who dares to venture out of the plantation of thought they have chosen to define as science. Are they merely seeking to avoid poisoning the well of "pure science?" That is what they say. Apparently as our scientific technological reach grows, as the magnitude of the universe grows and defies explanation of the cosmological constant that supports mankind's existence, as each cell of each living organism becomes a universe in itself, a growing number of scientists are getting restless on the fairly limited plantation that remains around that watering hole of Darwinist naturalism.

Sure, there is huge room within naturalism for evidence...always has been, always will be BUT... as the author stated, there is at Darwinist naturalism's core, an a prior assumption. You don't have to be a scientist to understand how this limits - denies- inquiring into evidential data of a super (or supra) natural.

Science knows from history what effect denial has had on its research. Before the enlightenment it was the Church (religion) that issued the denial. Now it is a faction in the scientific community that seeks to define, control and limit its discipline and its would-be colleagues.

This by the way was the foundation of the Discovery Institute... a think tank to encourage evidential inquiry by scientists who could find no outlet for their research and findings. An alternative to "professional shunning" by a hostile controlled club whose membership criteria demanded intellectual conformity.

Her are a few of the criteria I see as required for membership in the club of pure science:

- Concepts such as "irreducible complexity" arise from ignorance of natural law, and must be accepted as unscientific conjecture ... not a theory to be proven or disproven

- Despite examples of apparent "coincidences" of design, examples of "poor design" (ie, Panda's thumbs) - must be accepted as proof of nondesign.
--- Subset: This proof requires one to believe that, logically, if there were a designer s/he would certainly be an engineer or a scientist, would create efficiently, perfectly and with order, not with the whimsy of an artist and not with human-like flaws

- In current research findings, living organisms obey the same physical laws as inanimate objects. Therefore a range of natural chemical reactions could (DID) take place, forming other chemicals with complex properties and ways of interacting. Over very long periods of time, self-replicating structures could (DID) arise and later form DNA.
---- Subset: OR what may appear irreducibly complex (see item 1 above) is not, because DNA ARRIVED ON EARTH FROM ELSWHERE IN THE COSMOS. We are not alone in the universe and will discover this. This is more logical than to consider the possibility of a supra natural force and a privileged species.

Although some (off-plantation, unscientific) researchers claim information theory demonstrates that DNA is a "code," and theorize that no natural process has ever created a code, these arguments merely take liberties with the definition of "code" and are examples of the logical error of equivocation, which is eschewed only in the domain of scientific thinkers

- There is a logical and philosophical problem with a supra natural undesigned designer creating a designed universe, therefore this tends to disprove any design or lead to a ridiculously unscientific endless cycle of design inference.

- Anyone who is known to practice or believe in a religion is suspect of being unable to be intellectually honest in the world of pure science (a criteria which eliminates most of the world great thinkers and many more who are here now)

On to other thoughts about your comments;
Throughout recorded history, early teleologists (including some who were Christian, some who were not) credited "nature's god" and nature as working together, in debatable levels of cooperation and intent. This phraseology is used by the Founders in our Declaration of Independence. This designer, nature's god, was called "the god of Spinoza" by Einstein. Einstein never lost his belief that the designer's methodology existed in a theory of everything, that the designer's methods could be determined by quantifying the results and going backward from there..and never assumed the designer cared much whether we discovered Him or not.

As for why science developed the technology we see all around us, from a cosmological perspective much of it seems to be following Einstein's footsteps to discover whether he was on the right path, or not.

And as for the sciences like biology, well, I think they can credit a lot of their research to a drive to disprove ID and affirm.... a-teleological naturalism.

Among so many other topics, I think it ironic that a great scientist like Francis Crick extended naturalism to include panspermia (finding ET or ET's DNA on Mars or ET's cosmic signature emanating from Sirius will disprove "God"). And that the excitement about multiverse theory is the underlying expectation it will bolster a-teleological theories.

And that kids in a public school classroom could not even be led in this debate we are having here unless perhaps the foregone conclusions of the debate were required to be "neutrally naturalist" (and a-teleological).

As for naturalism being evidence based...well, the starting point of naturalism is an assumption that nature created itself. There simply is no where else to go in a circle. Once you fly off the circle you are in the "no man's land" of "non science" as defined by Darwinist naturalists.

They are called the natural sciences for a good reason. The presumption of naturalism in science has worked well for centuries, and there is no convincing reason to alter it now, other than the fact that it upsets the sensitivities of certain people.

Naturalistic evolution has succeeded in making a myriad of specific, successful predictions; hence its success. Can you think of one, just one, specific example of a prediction of data ever made assuming a supernatural cause? (By specific, I don't mean a sweeping generalization about life on earth; I mean, something like, what specific fossil might be found in a particular region, or the location of a specific protein in a DNA sequence.)

Until then, there's no motivation to call ID science, other than the fact that the theory that actually works (evolution) has consequences some consider upsetting. Scientists don't give up pursuit of knowledge just because of popular sentiment.