Intelligent Design: Did you design yourself?

[Esquilax]

Is intelligent design a scientific theory?Yes.

No. Scientific theories make predictions and open themselves up to tests, something that intelligent design has never done. If you wish to say otherwise, please propose a falsifiable test of intelligent design, and more importantly, the demonstrable mechanism of intelligent design. The latter is literally step one, and aside from some glib insinuations that it's god, I've never seen anyone show this mechanism.

The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI).

Stop! What's the definition of complex and specified information, how can it be demonstrated to exist objectively, and how can it be measured?

Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI.

"High levels," implies you're capable of putting a numerical value on it, and also that you have an idea of what a normal level of complex and specified information would look like. That's good, because you'd need those things to be classified as a scientific theory, so what are they?

Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

Irreducible complexity is, at its heart, one great big argument from ignorance, as used as a scientific test. All it's really saying is "I can't think of a way that this could have evolved, and therefore it didn't," because unless you know how something actually developed you've got no way of knowing whether it truly is irreducible; in Heywood's examples the reason we know of irreducible complexity there is because we literally witnessed it, and even then it's entirely possible to propose an evolutionary method for the same thing.

Not to mention, irreducible complexity as you're attempting to apply it is thoroughly unscientific anyway, because all it's doing is trying to poke holes in the established theory of evolution. No matter how many negative arguments you make, no matter the number of "evolution couldn't do that"s you can find, that doesn't add up to proof of intelligent design. Positive proof does that, and intelligent design doesn't even make predictions through which positive proof could be ascertained.

The entire thing is a shit show designed to assuage creationist egos, which is so aptly demonstrated by the fact that the best evidence it has, irreducible complexity, is nothing more than an attempt to prove evolution wrong. That's not a scientific test, it's a smear campaign.