You assert that the intolerance for intelligent design hypotheses is because they do not result in testable or observable predictions. I cannot speak for the fellows at Discovery.org - but I have been offering one around here for a couple of years which is both observable and falsifiable:
The Euclid algorithm includes processes, symbols, decisions and recursives and is purposeful. Decision making, awareness and purpose are properties of intelligence - therefore such properties existing at the inception of a thing (whether entirely internal as in initial rules for self-organizing complexity or whether externally interfaced as in communications) indicates an intelligence causation.
Falsifications: (a) evidence that there is no algorithm at inception, (b) evidence that there was no inception, (c) evidence that decision-making, awareness and purpose are not properties of intelligence.
Concerning life v non-life/death in nature, evidence one way or the other will emerge from the current research in self-organizing complexity and information theory (successful communications) in biological systems: e.g. what are the minimum rules, state changes, mathematical structures, geometries and whether they have [Euclid] algorithmic properties of decision-making including purpose and awareness.
I recall this being discussed a few months a go. Some of our more math-literate posters really tore into it. I'm not qualified to re-create what they said, and I didn't fully follow the discussion. My vague recollection is that even an undirected process can be described with an algorithm, so the existence of such wouldn't be persuasive. But I may have that wrong, so I'll leave it to the others to deal with.
Falsifications: (a) evidence that there is no algorithm at inception, (b) evidence that there was no inception, (c) evidence that decision-making, awareness and purpose are not properties of intelligence.
As for these falsifications, I don't think (a) or (b) really test anything, and (c) doesn't do much for me. This whole area needs work. And I'm pretty much out of the ID game, for reasons stated earlier in the thread.
Which gives me more time to extend [hugs]!
OR both. It seems that scientific materialists cling to the idea that the only thing going on in the world is matter in its motions. Yet this seems to be a flying jump to conclusions, IMHO. As far as I know, there has never been a single formal study of this issue as such in all of science. That is, it is just a generalized, vague assumption, something just "taken for granted"....
Notwithstanding, there seem to be things in the world which are not materially-based (e.g., the "informational" -- physical laws themselves and also worldviews, which often furnish an undisclosed premise on which research and analysis are based); and then there are others that are "physical" (e.g., vacuum fields, which are presumably not "material" in any usual sense).
One major problem I see regarding "classical" neo-Darwinist theory is that it does not take the quantum world into effect at all, nor is it otherwise the least bit interested in questioning whether there are deeper organizational levels beyond what can be "seen" -- e.g., recursive algorithms, vacuum fields, geometry, cellular automata, and suchlike -- outside of "random mutation" and "natural selection." Which, when you boil it all down, refer to processes thought to be spontaneously produced by environmental pressures -- i.e., from "inside" the visible world.
What this most reminds me of is the creation myth of the ancient Sumerians, who figured that the whole world was riding on the back of a huge sea turtle, swimming or floating in an infinite sea. Like the old Sumerians, it seems to me there are quite a few people around today who want to study the world, but they have no interest in the turtle, nor in the infinite sea.
To translate this analogy, the world is the visible, material world that materialism wants to reduce to matter and its motions. The turtle represents the physical laws and any deeper cosmic principles from which they may derive. And the infinite sea is the quantum world.
Of course, the only part of the Sumerian insight (and the directly analogous scientific materialist one) that is directly observable is the physical world. But that doesn't make the turtle or the sea "go away."
I know the analogy is a tad fanciful; but the parallels are there in my view. In the end, "classical" science wants to look at "the tip of the iceberg" and at not at the vast depths that lie beneath the surface....
FWIW, for as long as it takes this attitude, Darwinian evolutionary theory necessarily would constitute little more than a "just-so story" to my mind.
Alamo-Girl, thank you so much for your excellent posts today!