Why Intelligent Design is not Science

For anyone not familiar with Intelligent Design (ID). It is basically the idea that things in nature are so complicated that they must have been designed and cannot have evolved. ID makes a poor attempt to distance it's self from the more religious focused Creationism by leaving the identity of the designer a mystery. The ID movement is heavily embedded in the Christian right and mainly in America. There have been actual attempts to get ID into the classroom as science in some states of the US. In 2005 there was a land mark case in which Judge Jones threw the ID proponents out saying, in a nutshell, that ID is not science and has no place in a science classroom. And he was 100% right. ID is not science. Here's why.

1) ID makes no predictions.
In order for a theory to be considered and accepted as science. It must make predictions that can be tested and potentially falsified. ID can not, and doesn't, make predictions. When your hypothesis is that some supernatural entity designed all of the life that we see. Then there are no predictions that can follow from this. By definition of the supernatural, it is out side of the natural world and thus unknowable by humans. This is completely contrary to the fundamental ideas of science. Science can only operate in the natural world because it is required to make predictions. Once a supernatural element is introduced into the mix the hypothesis ceases to be science.

2) ID conducts no experiments.
This is related to the previous point. A scientific theory must be able to propose and conduct experiments and/or observations that could potentially falsify the theory. ID fails this test so completely that it should become blindingly obvious at this point that it in not science. The answer to any question that ID can propose it the designer made it that way. This leads to the outcome that ID can never be falsified and so never be proven wrong. Every legitimate scientific theory must have the potential to be proven false. In fact. It is only once a particular theory is tested over and over and proven to be correct that it is accepted.

3) The evidence for ID can be adequately explained by better theories.
When ID proponents argue for their position they almost always take the position as follows. X cannot be explained by evolution. Therefore evolution is wrong and life is intelligently designed. This is not a valid line of logic and not the way science is done. So far in the history of the movement. All the so called evidence for ID is adequately explained by evolution. And the ID proponents also miss one of the most vital ideas in science when they resort to this line of logic. If we don't know something right now or don't have an explanation for some particular thing. That's ok. There is no need to make the massive and highly improbable leap to an intelligent designer. If science knew everything it would be boring and some what redundant. The point of science is to find out what we don't know and try to explain and understand it. If you allow the supernatural into the fold as an explanation. Then the whole endeavor of investigation ends then and there.

Science is a good thing. The last 200 years of science have provided us with all the wonders of modern society that we enjoy today. If we want to continue to make progress we have to make sure that science is kept free form the sort of rubbish that the ID crowd brings. Simply dressing ID up in the trappings of science does not make it so.