PaulK
Posts: 37
Joined: June 2004
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Sorry, but intelligent design isn't a theory in the same sense that evolution is at all.
Evolution proposes testable positive hypotheses and leads to more. The main ID hypothesis is "there is somethong in the history of life that can never be explained by anything other than design".
And it is not the search for intelligence that is deemed unscientific - it is the methods ID proposes using - and the fact that they seem unable to even apply those correctly. Dembski's hopeless attamtp to show that a bacterial flagellum was designed when he managed to misrepresent Behe and seriusly misapply his own methodology is a case in point. Meyer's recent paper contains equally bad blunders.
To point out one significant difference SETI has worked out criteria in advance - ID does not. Radio transmission is also far better understood than the details of evolutionary history. So SETI has a far firmer basis than ID.
And one final point it is all very well to talk about "probability calculations" in the abstract but we need positive examples where they have been done - correctly. In fact there is one way to "fix' the result - do the wrong calculation and then claim success. Which is exactly what Dembski did in No Free Lunch
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