Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

It is apparent that speculation about the nature of the designer isn't a part of the scientific method, and therefore isn't "scientific". To make speculation "scientific" it must be fleshed out with a formal hypothesis to provisionally explain observations, the crucial conducting of an experiment, and analysis of results. Speculation about the nature of the designer has no elements of observation and conducting of experiments and analysis of results versus predictions of the hypothesis. There isn't anything "scientific" about pure speculation. 

The ID research conducted by those few ID-friendly scientists working in the field deliberately stays away from such speculation - it isn't science. These investigators are simply trying to scientifically establish that contrary to Darwinism there must have been some creative intelligent teleological factor in evolution, maybe a designer or designers, maybe something else. That is enough of a challenge, not finding "a bridge to a scriptural Deity" .

I think that scientists researching ID deliberately stay away from the question of the nature of the putative designer or designers (either immaterial or material) precisely because it just can't be investigated by the methods of science as it has been practiced for a few centuries.

It is a problem with threads that go on for hundreds of pages that points will inevitably get made and remade and remade. I can remember making this same point several times since I started this thread three years ago.

In short, scientists who argue that ID is unscientific often make the argument that science must adhere to methodological naturalism. Naturalism means a definition of natural that excludes the so-called super-natural. Any appeal to a supernatural designer is therefore not scientific and it must follow that ID which, they say, clearly appeals to the supernatural, spiritual or divine, cannot be scientific. 

However, while the more prominent ID researchers have made it clear that many of them are indeed practising Christians and that their research is funded by religious foundations, they have used precisely defined scientific methods to show the weakness of the neo-darwinian model. I've seen debates posted on YouTube where their opponents flatly refuse to address such research because, they claim, it is unscientific for the reasons just explained. I've posted a clip previously where methodological naturalism was specifically invoked to disqualify the arguments of ID proponents (skip to 49 minutes in this clip).

https://youtu.be/2S-OGNpItwo

Surely, if evidence of intelligence and purpose in nature is apparent, it should be a legitimate field of inquiry for science even if the nature of such intelligence is not? Otherwise, consciousness itself would be ruled out of bounds for science. Some eliminative materialists such as the Churchlands and Dennett (philosophers) would support that extreme position maintaining that consciousness is an illusion and has no actual reality. But for others, even hard-line atheists like Sam Harris (another philosopher), consciousness cannot be dismissed so lightly. He says:

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.

Even Scientific American has published articles on the relationship that science has with consciousness. This is a recent (and interesting) example:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...tractable/