DOES INTELLIGENT DESIGN (ID) QUALIFY AS SCIENCE?

According to Wikipedia, it does not:

• Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data and which require explanations to be based on empirical evidence.

However, all scientists, IDers included, do science the same way, using the same methods. All observe, measure, quantify, and replicate findings. There is only one difference between IDers and non-IDers. Non-IDers (naturalists) insist that only natural explanations are allowable.

However, this is largely a philosophical issue. It asks these questions:

• “What underlies the objective scientific laws/forces and the resultant findings? Do these laws originate, operate, and continue immutably naturally or supernaturally (ID)? What is the ultimate source of causation and being?”

This question must be answered philosophically and not just scientifically. As such, ID is no less scientific than naturalism, neither of which can be directly observed or measured. Instead, they both represent pre-scientific considerations.

Nevertheless, science can and does ask the question of ultimate causation, even though it cannot be directly determined by measurement. It asks:

1. Where does life come from?
2. What is the origin of the laws of science? The fine-tuning of the universe? The universe itself with its Big Bang? Matter? Space? Time?

How then are these questions to be resolved?

In fact, some naturalists have forsaken their naturalistic understanding of the universe for partially scientific reasons. The now-deceased Antony Flew has been called the “foremost atheist thinker of the 20th century.” However, after 40 years of debating Christians, he surprised the world.

At a 2004 debate at New York University, Flew declared that he “now accepted the existence of a God” (Antony Flew with Roy Varghese, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, p. 74). In that debate, he said that he believed that the origin of life points to a creative Intelligence:

• Almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence.” (75).

Did Flew have a religious experience that had biased him against a naturalistic explanation? He explained:

• I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what has traditionally been called natural theology. It has had no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. (93). 

However, Wikipedia claimed that:

• Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data.

If this is how we determine what science is, then Naturalism also fails. No amount of testing will suffice to determine that the laws/forces of science originate and operate naturally and unintelligently.