I found a very good, very thorough (though less amusing and less abrasive) explanation of why Intelligent Design is pseudoscience with no place in a legitimate discussion of science, here. It’s very long, but very good. It goes into great detail about the primary tenets of the Intelligent Design ideology which is good for background. Here is the cut-to-the-quick part that explains why Intelligent Design is entirely pseudoscience:
While proponents of Intelligent Design pretend to be scientists, this is not the case. Intelligent design does not meet the accepted standards of the scientific community for being a scientific theory. There is a concept in the philosophy of science of falsifiability. Karl Popper writes of this in his book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery:
“…All the statements of empirical science (or all ‘meaningful’ statements) must be capable of being finally decided, with respect to their truth and falsity; we shall say that they must be ‘conclusively decidable’. This means that their form must be such that to verify them and to falsify them must both be logically possible. Thus Schlick says: ‘…a genuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification’; and Waismann says still more clearly: ‘If there is no possible way to determine whether a statement is true then that statement has no meaning whatsoever. For the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification” (17)
Intelligent Design obviously does not fit this criterion. As should be clear by now, there is little if any evidence for Intelligent Design, but this does not prove it to be false. It is, in fact, impossible to prove it false. However unlikely it is that some form of intelligence created the universe, there is no way to verify or falsify the claim. God is invisible, we are told. He is undetectable. This is in contrast to Darwinism, which could easily be falsified if it were shown that some creature just appeared out of thin air, without any ancestors (though this may be difficult to prove, it would not be impossible). Therefore, Intelligent Design fails the test of falsifiability, and is therefore not a valid scientific theory.
One of the comments on the article makes an excellent point that suggesting that God needs to tamper with creation presupposes that an omniscient and omnipotent God couldn’t have set the universe up to be exactly what He wanted from the beginning. He created it, so He could let things evolve into the result he desires. Instead, pushing for Intelligent Design, the poster suggests, is a sign of zealotry and lack of respect for God’s power to design a universe where cause-and-effect are used to create precisely the design God wants. As God is outside of time, evolution may be merely one of God’s masterful brush-strokes across time. Intelligent Design encourages you to stop looking for causes and to stop trying to understand creation by simply claiming that because you obviously know the creator and have full and perfect knowledge of the creator, you no longer need to worry about the details of creation. In a way, science is the pursuit of the causal chain, and Intelligent Design proposes to cut short the chain of causality by stating that the far end of the chain of causality is an “intelligent designer” and that that is all you need to know.
Here’s an excerpt from a very funny editorial from Scientific American:
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details.
