Why intelligent design is a bad hypothesis

First, intelligent design (ID) is more about not having hypotheses than about having them. To quote an ID website, ID "holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." It is recognized by the "lack of any known law that can explain" seemingly purposeful design. As an aside, purposeful design is not the subject of any scientific law. Proponents of ID take deliberate advantage of lay misunderstanding of scientific usage regarding laws, theories and hypotheses.

Criterion 1: Excess empirical content

Does ID make interesting, potentially testable predictions? I cannot find any. It makes predictions only in the vapid sense of some statistical predictions: If one finds some phenomena that one is happy to assign to ID, one is likely to find others. It is difficult even then, however, to specify a priori what those new phenomena would be.

Criterion 2: Verified excess empirical content

Have any been tested and found accurate? Because we cannot fulfill Criterion 1, we cannot get to Criterion 2. Because it makes no testable predictions, ID cannot be tested and so cannot be scientific in any useful sense.

Criterion 3: Connectedness to other knowledge

Is ID connected to any other body of scientific theory or observation? No, it is purely and simply an untestable religious theory. This point is obfuscated at ID websites by suggesting that several scientific fields including anthropology and forensic sciences use intent or design as a criterion for drawing conclusions. Human design is recognized by observation of human design and testing of hypotheses about it.

Summary

Intelligent design is religious speculation or assertion. It is not in any sense an alternative to the scientific theory of evolution that continues to make many interesting predictions, many of which are found to be accurate. Lack of fit to the predictions has been even more informative in improving more sophisticated and mechanistic theories of evolution. The only evolution evident in ID theory is continual refining of its semantic obfuscation aimed at the layperson.


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