One of the tactics used by evolutionists against intelligent design is to claim that it is unscientific. This claim rests on two main smaller claims. The first is that it is not naturalistic and the second is that it is unfalsifiable. What is interesting is that by attacking the scientific nature of intelligent design in biology they are attacking it in fields such as archaeology and criminal forensics.
The first claim is that intelligent design cannot be considered scientific because it is not naturalistic, and science can only consider naturalistic explanations. This is fundamentally untrue because there is nothing in the scientific method that forbids a supernatural explanation. It is only in institutionalized science where there is a priori commitment to naturalism. Such an argument does not exclude a possibility of some kind of natural designer. Ultimately the key to understanding this argument is a desire on the part of those making it to exclude God as a possible explanation for anything.
When you look at the scientific method there is nothing in it that says that the hypothesis being proposed has to be naturalistic. All that is actually needed is that it has to be testable. In order to be testable a hypothesis has to produce some results that can be detected. One thing frequently not pointed out is the fact that naturalistic explanations can also be untestable. In both cases, the hypothesis simply has to be narrow enough to make testable predictions. However, both natural and supernatural explanations can be too broad to produce testable predictions. String theory is an example of just such a hypothesis. The concept exists as an attempt to unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces, but it is so flexible that it cannot produce falsifiable predictions.
While an intelligent designer can be considered unfalsifiable in the sense of being able to produce structures totally indistinguishable from something produced by natural forces. Such a notion not only applies in biology but in archaeology and criminal forensics as well. In fact, when committing a murder, the most intelligent thing the perpetrator can do is to make the death look as natural as possible. Also, overly broad hypotheses such as “God did it”, “the Egyptians did it”, “a murderer did it” or even “natural causes did it” are unfalsifiable.
If, however, you narrow your focus to more specific details it becomes possible to make testable predictions. One aspect of intelligent design is the fact that intelligence can be highly determinative resulting in it being able to overcome even the smallest of statistical improbabilities. This means that one of the predictions that come from considering an intelligent designer is the presence of extremely improbable arrangements, that reach to the level of being statistically impossible.
Another prediction of intelligent design is the presence of irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is the situation where a system will not function if it is reduced to a simpler state. Evolutionists have tried to demonstrate that such claims are false. One in particular is the human eye. The human eye has many aspects to it that makes it cannot function without, making it irreducibly complex. It doesn't take much for any of these futures to be either removed or malformed for the eye to not work properly or at all. Evolutionists tend to attack the irreducible complexity of the human eye, by comparing it to those of various animals. One of the problems with these attacks is that they are simply aligning existing functional eyes in a sequence that simply adds new parts, sometimes erroneously. However, they neglect the problem of going between those on the list. One other thing that is often missed is the fact that the eyes usually present are of aquatic creatures. This means they are completely ignoring the differences between seeing underwater and in the air. It also ignores the fact that cells themselves are irreducibly complex in the sense that there are levels to which they can be reduced that will kill them.
A third prediction of intelligent design is that the more we learn about life the more highly organized and complex it will be seen to be. Also, the difficulty of producing a living cell from scratch will increase as we learn more. Going back to Darwin's day a cell was considered to be nothing more than a simple little blob protoplasm. Since then, we have discovered the existence of numerous organelles and molecular machines that are responsible for a cell functioning. Furthermore, we have learned that a cell operates with a complex specific information system that we call DNA.
Ultimately, as a theory for intelligent design is falsifiable because it makes several testable predictions which makes it a scientific concept. Furthermore, these predictions have been demonstrated successfully. It is quite interesting how no one really has any problem with efforts to detect intelligence in archaeology, forensics, and even SETI. However, in biology, it is fundamentally rejected. This is because the real problem is a fundamental rejection of the concept of intelligent design in general by institutionalized science. At its core, this is because of a fundamental rejection of God.
