One of the key criticisms tossed over at Intelligent Design is that it is not "falsifiable." Needless to say, this results in a considerable amount of hairsplitting over exactly what "falsifiable" means and why it is important. This usually gets tangled up in a big hairball over experimental sciences vs field-work sciences, etc., etc.
But it's really not that complicated.
The core questions that one must ask about any theory, of any kind, that is proposing to offer a view of the world are:
For example, general relativity has proven exceptionally resistant to being tossed out the door by those criteria. It predicted gravitational lensing; gravitational lensing was dutifully found. Experiments were constructed that would falsify general relativity; those experiments did not come back with data that indicated that general relativity was false.
The problem with Intelligent Design is that the answers to those questions are, respectively, "Anything we find proves it" and "there is nothing that could possibly be found that would prove that it is not true, because it is." Thus, claiming that it is science (or, indeed, investigation at all) is absurd. If my theory is that the world is made up of some wonderful substance called Splorg, and every single fact that has or ever will exist demonstrates that the world is, indeed, made up of Splorg because that's the way I say it is . . . well, as a professor of mine once said, "Now that you know that, what do you know?"
As Simon Blackburn points out in his wonderful book Truth, one of the ways we know something is "true" is that it gives us purchase over the world. We know the germ theory of disease is true, in part, because assuming the truth of it has given us near-miraculous weapons against disease. We know that electrons are "true" because assuming that such things as electrons has given us astonishing ability to control electricity. And we know evolution is "true" because it has allowed us to explain things that were simply inexplicable before.
It's impossible to decouple religion from Intelligent Design not because we're all trying to paint people who believe it in as some kind of religious weirdos, but because the argument is, in essence, a faith-based argument: It's true because I believe it to be true, and nothing will ever shake me of this belief, because I know it in my heart to be true.
That's a statement of faith, not science. Anyone who says that a theory must be true and nothing could possibly show otherwise isn't doing science.
posted 17:54