WHICH IS THE SUPERIOR PARADIGM: ID OR NATURALISM?

One Facebooker presented this thoughtful challenge:

·       How do you prove something is ID? You can't because there is no solid evidence to support such a claim. Your means of "proving" ID is simply labeling phenomenon we don't understand as supernatural. I think that sort of thinking stunts progress. If everyone simply shrugged their shoulders and attributed things they don't understand to the supernatural we wouldn't do much in the way of trying to learn why and how things work.

This is a charge commonly but mistakenly made against intelligent design (ID). I therefore responded:

“Thanks for your challenge. I think that this same challenge cuts even deeper against naturalism. There is no direct evidence that anything is natural or that has ever happened naturally. Even the tiniest atom is a marvel of design. Even the elegant, immutable, and causal laws of science give evidence of ID (not to mention consciousness, freewill, life, fine-tuning of the universe, and even the very existence of the laws of science, which are unable to create something out of nothing).

How do we know that something is designed? If we see a name scratched out in the rock, we automatically perceive that it had been designed. We easily recognize the products of design. However, how do we detect non-design? It seems that even chaos is patterned. This observation seems to indicate that the entire world is unable to deviate from design. Perhaps the universe is telling us something!

And the laws of science? They too seem to be designed. Just look at E = MC2. It is precise, unchanging, universal, and knowable. It provides evidence of an unalterable relationship among elements that ordinarily seem to be disparate – energy, mass, and even the speed of light (precisely squared). Do explosions (Big Bangs) create such order, immutability and universality? Hardly!

Why then is naturalism the prevailing belief of science? There is not a single shred of evidence that supports it. Therefore, it seems that we should conclude that it is simply an alternative religion or God-substitute, perhaps no more than a "shrugging of the shoulders?"