Philosophy is the first science, actually, and is at its heart about questing for fundamental and universal knowledge.
You seem not to have read the article in question. The point is simple: it is scientifically possible to search for whether or not the current explanation of evolution is able to reasonably explain the creation of new life forms. If it cannot, one can reasonably use scientific tools to determine whether or not the DNA present on Earth bears signs of having been designed rather than created by mere happenstance. This is all scientifically relevant and possible.
Remember modern physics is based upon fundamental and postulated particles that could not be proven by the scientists who postulated them. For a scientist to postulate the existence of a Designer is perfectly in keeping with this method (see Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg for many examples of scientists using those things they could see to formulate scientific principles about things they could not).
Perhaps the problem is that you are not familiar with the history of the sciences (evidently particularly not philosophy, since you have discounted figures such as Lucretius who was a philosopher who studied what we would now call physics). Instead of addressing the issue with a reasonable argument, you laughed off the fundamental premises by pretending they were else than they really are. This is called a straw-man argument, something that philosophy students would know all about, but which you evidently are not capable of grasping.
But philosophers have been left behind by modern science. They may have started things out millennia ago, but they are now little more than janitors to the overall scientific endeavor (to stretch a metaphor).
Yes, science was once known as “natural philosophy”. And by concentration only upon natural explanations for natural phenomena science has gleaned an amazing about of useful knowledge about the universe.
My point is that it is not at all surprising to me that a philosopher thinks that a philosophy of “intelligent design” is a “scientific approach”. He seems to think any and all philosophy is a “scientific approach” and chaffs at the idea that people know and care about science because it accomplishes things and gains knowledge while philosophy accomplishes nothing and gains no knowlde while they wax philosophic about how far their discipline have been left behind in the estimation of their fellow men.
And thanks for the insults!
You are right. I postulate that the Designer was my father. Prove me wrong.
I cannot fathom how a Christian that believes the earth is about 6000 years old can support a philosophy that says that a "designer" created man from a sea of chemicals and has a leader that says the 'designer' is most probably dead since there has been no evidence of his interaction in the evolution of may for the last few hundred million years ...