Nevertheless, it ought to be very straight forward to judge evidence without bias. Juries and judges do it every day - as has a previously very biased general public in recovering from centuries of racial bias.
Sure, none of these have been perfect - but a good faith effort over all these years has served us very well indeed.
In sum, it requires awareness, honesty and personal discipline to recognize when one is harboring a personal prejudice and then overcome it.
You:
That should include ideological bias as well. Nevertheless, it ought to be very straight forward to judge evidence without bias. Juries and judges do it every day - as has a previously very biased general public in recovering from centuries of racial bias. Sure, none of these have been perfect - but a good faith effort over all these years has served us very well indeed. In sum, it requires awareness, honesty and personal discipline to recognize when one is harboring a personal prejudice and then overcome it.
I can't go with this. Using lovely-sounding language ("good faith," "honesty"), plus a really neat analogy to racial bias, you are cloaking yourself in what you imagine is a guise of intellectual neutrality, and from that supposedly lofty position you are attempting to do what the Kansas school board is doing -- you want to change the very definition of science to include the supernatural.
As we've discussed many times before, science can't do that. It's not bias; it's reality. It's not philosophical materialism; it's the necessity of the workplace -- procedural materialism. The evidence that science works with was often neglected or misunderstood in pre-scientific times, because people were so preoccupied by thoughts of the supernatural that they neglected to investigate the natural world. Pre-scientific intellectuals usually had disdain for the natural world.
So into that scorned and neglected area came the grubby, getting-his-hands-dirty naturalist -- doing natural (not supernatural) philosophy. Science works, and works very well, because it's limited to searching out natural causes and explanations. It's got a niche and it stays there. A scientist can't do deity-research in the lab. There's no DeoScope, no DeoMeter, no deity scales or tools of any kind for a scientist to work with.
Call it an "ideological bias" if you like to feel victimized, but that's not what it is. It's the procedural method that makes science ... well, science. There's no way in this world you'll ever persuade the scientific community that unseen interventions by the unknown, un-evidenced, "green men from Uranus" have equal (or possibly superior) standing as the cause of anything.
Intelligent Design: A hypothesis wherein given features of life v non-life are explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection.
A number of objections have been raised, so I will remind everyone of the provisional question that we're answering:
What is Intelligent Design? In other words, what makes a hypothesis an Intelligent Design hypothesis?
So, what we are looking for is those attributes that are both necessary and sufficient to classify a hypothesis as an Intelligent Design hypothesis. We are not (yet) restricting ourselves to any given sphere of inquiry, nor are we building standards of evaluation into the basic classification.
These are the latest proposed alternatives:
(from PatrickHenry) The Intelligent Design Hypothesis: Certain biological features or processes that are otherwise inexplicable may be explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection.
(from Alamo-Girl) Intelligent Design Hypothesis: Certain features of life v non-life may be best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process.
So, let's review.
1) It is not necessary that an Intelligent Design hypothesis be restricted to biological features or processes. ID hypotheses can (and do) regard non-biological features. There seems to be a silly debate about the origin of the value of pi in this very thread.
2) It is not necessary that an Intelligent Design hypothesis regard features that are otherwise inexplicable. Most (if not all) ID hypotheses don't. This is relevant to the evaluation of the hypothesis, but not to its classification.
3) It is not necessary that an Intelligent Design hypothesis be the "best" explanation. An ID hypothesis could just as well be the worse explanation, and many are, especially the ones that fantasize intelligent causes for the existence of which no evidence has been identified.
4) It is sufficient that an Intelligent Design hypothesis requires an intelligent cause, by contrast to an undirected process. How one defines "intelligence" (or undirectedness) as an abstract concept is extraneous to the basic definition.
5) It is both sufficient and necessary that any one Intelligent Design hypothesis identify given features, not just "certain features" in the abstract.
6) It is necessary that an Intelligent Design hypothesis examine whether the given features "are" explained by intelligent cause, not just whether they "may" be explained by intelligent cause. Anything and everything "may" be explained by intelligent cause...
So, attempts to insert subjectivity, ambiguity, value-judgment, ambivalence, equivocation, and standards of evaluation into the basic classificatory definition are rejected. We are not (yet) speaking of The Intelligent Design Hypothesis, so that formulation is rejected as well. The more precise "that" in lieu of "wherein" is accepted. The excision of "such as natural selection" is provisionally rejected. It is technically redundant - the definition is functional without it - but it helps clarify what is meant by "undirected process" and, in contrast, by "intelligent cause." It also implicitly alerts the reader that such hypotheses are most commonly and ordinarily presented with regard to "biological features or processes" - a decent compromise, no?
There is one final modification that I would recommend, but I will hold off for now until it's determined that the above topics have been resolved for our purposes. To avoid confusion, this is the very slightly modified definition that we are now still debating:
Intelligent Design: A hypothesis that given features of life v non-life are explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection.
With no apparent objection, "that" has been inserted in place of "wherein" from the previous definition. We have thereby properly excluded tangential hypotheses wherein Intelligent Design may be implicit, but which do not address specific causes of given features.