Some thoughts about why ID isn't and couldn't be science.
ID starts from a premise that a world, or organism, designed by an intelligence, would tend to look like X. But the reason science excludes supernatural intelligence from study is that we neither know nor can know what a world or organism that is designed by one would look like, nor how it would differ from one that wasn't. Therefore it's unfalsifiable. And falsifiability is (generally held to be) key to a scientific theory. It's impossible to assert any condition whatsoever that would falsify this premise. The only thing IDers ever put forward that would falsify it is a feature that could not be explained by ToE. Which is, of course, not the kind of thing we are looking for at all. We're looking for an objective, observable prediction int he natural world. The dial will read 47. Organisms will all fit into a nested hierarchy. That kind of thing. Worse, it's pure God of the gaps.
ID combines basically Paley's watch with God of the Gaps. It posits: We can't explain X, therefore we must assume a (supernatural) intelligence did X. God of the Gaps sucks rocks.
First, history shows us that we tend to close those gaps. That's what science is all about. Rather than say, as science does, "We can't explain X, let's find out," ID throws up its hands, halts all research, and fills in the blank with God. It's not just unscientific, it's anti-scientific.
Second, it's terrible theology. Every time you fill in a gap with knowledge, (as science does regularly) you get a punier God. For example, Behe is left with a God who didn't set up evolution or natural laws, but rather fiddled around with a butt-widget on a gut bug. What kind of God is that? If God is worth anything, then He must have set up the whole shebang: evolution, Big Bang, Planck's constant, everything. He may have done so, but science can never discover that, if so. Trying to do so shoe-horms God into a little box. And what kind of God is that?
And Paley's watch, while it tends to work for theists, is unsatisfactory to me and most non-theists. At most, it gets me a God so unknowable and other-worldly as to be functionally non-existent in my world and my life.
