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Quote from kjkent1:
Well, I can see nothing's changed in the past 3 months since I've logged in here.
Whether or not Intelligent Design is equivalent to Creationism is irrelevant. The relevant issue is: Is Intelligent Design "scientific."
I submit that it is not, BECAUSE, Intelligent Design (ID) advocates do not conduct experiments to verify their hypotheses.
The fundamental hypothesis of ID is that organic life is the product of an intelligent designer.
As far as I am aware, no one has yet developed an experiment to successfully test this hypothesis.
William Dembski has proposed a host of mathematical constructs which were claimed to prove the negative, i.e., that organic life is too complex to have evolved in the available time since the Universe's proposed start time (Big Bang), and therefore, said life must be designed.
Unfortunately for Prof. Dembski, Dr. Thomas Schneider's little "EV" software program disproved all of Dembski's math, by evolving a mathematical organic structure in a very short timeframe, and, as of today, no one in the ID community has managed to conduct an experiment which demonstrates that Schneider's software doesn't work as advertised.
Conversely, those who propose the hypothesis that organic life evolves, (1) do not make any claims as to how said life "began," and (2) conduct experiments to verify their hypothesis.
Such experiments are not all empirical studies of fossils -- Dr. Richard Lenski has bacteria in his lab which have evolved new and different traits over the duration of his experiments.
The point here is not to suggest that it isn't possible that a "hidden" designer is responsible for organic evolution, but merely to demonstrate that when an experiment measuring evolutionary change is conducted, the scientist, either records that the change has occurred or that it hasn't. The scientist does NOT impute the change to the unseen hand of an intelligent designer, because that action would not be scientific.
The scientist will simply state that random mutation occurred, causing the organism to evolve.
Could that random mutation be the product of a divine or alien intervention? Absolutely. However, it falls to the Intelligent Design advocate to prove that hypothesis, not to the Evolution advocate to disprove quantum mechanics.
So, until someone in the ID community successfully proves that random mutation is not random, ID will remain a completely speculative, mathematical postulate, rather than a scientific discipline.
It would be no different were scientists unable to set up experiments to confirm Einstein's relativity equations -- they would have remained purely theoretical.
And, so we wait (or, at least I do), for the Intelligent Designer to appear and tell us what he/she/it did to create organic life, or for some person who wants to prove ID is science to conduct an experiment which proves that it is.
But, until that occurs, whether or not ID is Creationism is irrelevant, because ID is not science.