No intelligence behind ID

Yesterday I read "Let's have a proper scientific debate" from The Age about the controversy regarding Intelligent Design (ID). Now for something to be scientific, its got to follow the scientific method. That is, to be a scientific theory it must be based on evidence, it should make predictions and it should be falsifiable. Falsifiable means that there must be some experiment which could prove the theory wrong. For example, I state that the earth is flat. The experiment would be to walk east forever. If the earth was flat, I should come to an edge or I would continue forever and never reach my starting point. Similarly, the same goes for the theory that the earth is a sphere. It can be tested in the same way. The result of the experiment tells us whether to accept or reject the particular theory.

Now ID does not make predictions and is not falsifiable. Hence it isn't scientific. Hence you can't have a proper scientific debate. It doesn't even get to start. The first question the author should be asking himself is "Is it scientific?" or more to the point "Do I know what science is?".

To me it is a "god of the gaps". If we don't know something then the answer must be that some supernatural being did it. Throughout human history supernatural beings have been used to fill gaps in our knowledge. But these beings vanish once we actually find the mechanisms behind nature. Image if the date was 1905 and not 2005. If all people thought that it was a supernatural being who was responsible for the things we didn't know, we would have no TV, computers, penicillin, knowledge of DNA, etc, etc. All ID does is to stop further questioning. Sound familiar?

In it the author suggest that Anthony Flew, a world famous atheist, has accepted ID. Read this article which was written by someone who followed this up and interviewed Flew. Read the January 2005 update at the bottom and make up your own mind. For mine, this 82 year old has just given up because it is too hard to investigate the evidence. Great science, hey.