The argument to exclude intelligent design from science goes like this. Since we cannot see a designer, we cannot conclude scientifically that one exists. This is a viable argument if it were equally applied to all competing explanations. Why should such a rule arbitrarily be forced on those who accept the more plausible explanation of intelligent design and not on those who posit the less plausible explanation of totally natural forces? For example, the naturalists are coming up with their theories as to how the universe came into existence, how life began, how the species evolved millions of years ago, how the geological formations of the world came into existence, and all kinds of other things that happened in a very distant past. Will we ever be able to observe any of these phenomena? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that there is a greater chance that we will see God than that we will see any of these events in the past. There are many records of perfectly sane people who have claimed to have encountered God. I know of not one single instance of a perfectly sane person claiming to have visited the past. So why can the anti-intellectual naturalists make their authoritative claims about something they have never seen?
Here is what true and pure science is, stripped of all the hyperbole and agenda driven definitions. Science is simply a quest to try to come up with the most plausible explanations for a full set of observable facts. That's it. Nothing more and nothing less.
There is only one law of scientific inquiry. Facts cannot be discarded. It is that one law of scientific inquiry that keeps science moving forward. Scientists aren't afforded the luxury of simply accumulating facts that support their theories and ignoring the ones that do not. It is only the naive who have a democratic view of science thinking that if 51% of the facts are favorable to a theory and 49% of the facts are against it, then the theory wins by majority rule. The history of science shows that all discredited theories had the majority of facts in their favor. However, it was the few contrary facts that motivated newer scientists to come up with explanations that could adequately handle all of the facts. The development of newer and better theories only occurs when scientist troubles by a few key facts that don't seem to fit call the prevailing theories into question.
It is said that "intelligent design" has no place in the science curriculum. That would be true if we knew for certain that there wasn't any intelligent being involved in the creation of life and in bio-diversity. But we don't know that. Could the most plausible explanation for everything that we see be that some intelligent designer put it all together? In light of the probabilities, that is the only conclusion any intellectually honest person must come to. Let me provide a couple of analogies that really clarified this point.
At Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, there are formations that appear to greatly resemble the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Let's say there was no record of how those formations got there and all we had to rely on is what we observe. We could come up with two explanations for the formation. One would be based on natural forces such as water erosion, wind erosion, and the shifting of the earth. The other would be based on intelligent design. Given the particular shapes we see, which one is a more plausible explanation? The only way that one could argue for water erosion is to explicitly exclude intelligent design as an acceptable explanation. How could we do that? By saying that since we did not see the designer at work, we can not posit intelligent design as a plausible explanation.
Now think of the precarious situation that would place the proponent of water erosion in. We may ask how these particular formations just happened to appear in the exact shapes of these specific presidents on the side of the mountain. They would likely be forced to make the large numbers argument. We all know that there are billions upon billions upon billions of celestial bodies in this universe. Each solid body has millions upon millions of solid formations on their surfaces. Certainly with all these trillions upon trillions of formations, there are bound to be some set somewhere that just happen to look like these four presidents. It just happens to be on the planet earth in South Dakota. One could argue that this is an explanation for what we see but one would be hard pressed to argue that it is the MOST PLAUSIBLE explanation. In fact I would suppose that any one forwarding such an explanation would only be doing so because he or she has a specific philosophical agenda that prejudices him or her against intelligent design.
To say that the designer is excluded from science because he cannot be seen is disingenuous coming from scientists who spend their lives making inferences about things they cannot see. In fact, if a scientist is not making inferences about things that cannot be seen, then he or she is not a scientist at all. He or she is merely a lab technician. The very nature of science is the process of making plausible explanations about what cannot be seen.
It is also the intelligent design scientists that are asking the hard questions that the totally naturalistic scientists are incapable of answering. The most notable example of this is in the area of evolution. To discuss all the problems such as irreducible complexity, non-convergence in the fossil record, and protein similarities among diverse species is way beyond the current discussion. However, it is not a stretch to say that if evolution is the best that naturalistic scientists can come up with, then intelligent design is certainly the most plausible explanation for biological diversity. Remember, evolution can't be declared as scientific truth simply because there are some facts that support it any more than we can conclude that the earth is the center of the universe because there are some facts that support it. A theory falls based on the facts that refute it. Science is progressing the most when facts are emerging which help us see the holes in our existing theories. That happens when scientists come to the discussion from different paradigms and are forced to defend their explanations given challenging factual evidence.
