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Thank you for your reply!

Deduction, or any sort of "inference," is not a "method" in itself. You can make "inferences" all day and all night, but they don't bear any significance unless they're attached to some hypothesis, model, theory, etc, that engages the real world, and their significance is in relation to how much -- how deeply, on how many points, how crucially -- your theory engages the world, and how many different kinds of data sets are implicated in testing your inferences, and so on.

I agree! And yet the hypotheses which changed the world can be stated with elegant simplicity, e.g. relativity, evolution. As I recall, Einstein expected elegance and simplicity in the “lofty structures” of all that there is.

IMHO, the Discovery Institute threw a prime rib roast into the arena of hungry theologians and scientists. It seemed as if the effort stopped with the hypothesis – and they sat back waiting for investigators to come up with the experiments to evidence or falsify the hypothesis.

Personally, I believe they are excellent strategists and it was intentional to separate the politics and legal aspects so they could play out separately – that they always knew the mathematicians and the physicists would vindicate the hypothesis.

I have no other explanation for the cautious, superb wording of the hypothesis which says:

Certain features of the universe and life are best explained by intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

The “certain features” keeps it from being an “origin of life” hypothesis and from being a replacement for evolution or any other theory.

The “intelligent cause” keeps it from being theology and opens the door to phenomenons such as emergent properties and fractals.

The “universe and life” changes the focus from strictly biology to cosmology, physics and math (which is the key).

The “undirected process such as natural selection” reveals the target: randomness. In that regard, I can think of two unequivocal statements which will make the point without any help at all from the Discovery Institute:

We cannot say that something is random in the system without knowing what the system “is”. Space/time is not yet known, thus the most we can say is that a physical thing is “apparently random."

Order cannot rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system. Chaotic systems, by definition, must be bounded, be sensitive to initial conditions, be transitive and have dense periodic orbits. Order requires a guide.

The point has already been largely made. People rarely refer to the formulation of the theory of evolution as “random mutations – natural selection > species”. They are much more likely these days to say “variation – natural selection > species”.

That subtle change of expression from “random mutations” to “variations” leaves the door open to “autonomous biological self-organizing complexity” and thereby the vindication of the hypothesis even if every single one of the investigators deplored the entire "intelligent design movement".