The current rendition of ID has not been tested at this time because the proponents haven't been able to present testable hypotheses. The current rendition of ID will remain outside of scientific inquiry until the proponents get their act together and present their idea in a scientific format. You do not see them claiming that ID is scientific because they can't make that claim until they do present testable hypotheses. If they could test their idea they would have published in real science journals by now. From past experience with ID claims, science would expect the current notions to fail, but the proponents of ID can always claim that the past does not apply to their ideas. Dembski does this by claiming that space aliens could be his designers. Basically, Dembski and all the others would be pretty much ignored in science until they come up with something that is scientific. The current controversy is over the fact that they think that they can teach something that isn't scientific in the science class as equivalent to the current models. Until there is some type of basis for saying yea or nay ID is equivalent to Newton claiming that angels were responsible for the discrepancy in his data. It may have been true, but there was no way to test it at the time. A few missing planets and a fellow named Einstein made that notion obsolete, but angels could still exist.

ID is going to be with us for a long time because science can't prove anything in, say, the mathematical sense. If I were the ID proponents I wouldn't want to live in that narrow world of some small doubt, but that is where they are stuck until they can do better than they have in the past.

-- Ron Okimoto, Asst. Prof., Univ. of Arkansas (posted 2/13, 9:35 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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