A friend writes and asks how ID comports with the “scientific method.” I respond:
As for the scientific method, I am all for it:
Question to be Investigated: What is the origin of complex specified information (CSI) and irreducibly complex (IC) mechanisms seen in even the simplest living things?
Hypothesis: CSI and IC have never been directly observed to have arisen though chance or mechanical necessity or a combination of the two. Conversely, CSI and IC are routinely observed to have been produced by intelligent agents. Moreover, intelligent agents leave behind indicia of their acts that can be objectively discerned. Therefore, using abductive reasoning, the best explanation for CSI and IC is “act of intelligent agent.”
The intelligent design project is, essentially, the scientific investigation of this hypothesis.
Interestingly, Darwinists make mutually exclusive attacks on the hypothesis. Some claim the hypothesis is not scientific because it cannot be, even in principle, falsified. Others claim the hypothesis fails because it has been falsified. Surely you will agree that it cannot be both.
The answer is that the hypothesis is, in principle, falsifiable.
All it would take is even one instance of CSI or IC being observed to arise through chance or mechanical necessity or a combination of the two. Such an observation would blow the ID project out of the water.
I have to add that typical Darwinist circular reasoning and “just so stories” will not do the trick. That is to say, reasoning of the following sort fails to impress: CSI arose though the combination of chance and mechanical necessity. How do you know this? Well, we inferred it from the data. And on what was your inference based? It was based on our a priori commitment to explanations based solely on chance and mechanical necessity through which all interpretations of the data must be filtered.