Intelligent Design as a scientific theory?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Because they can't come up with a rigor for it. Just bald assertions. The Unintelligent Design Institute didn't want the Dover Bored of Education to add it to the curriculum. That's why they didn't send an serious "talent" to the trial.

Intelligent Design isn't a complete hypothesis, and I don't see it ever being that way. Maybe they also figure that they wouldn't get far by trying to push it into schools.

The Institute for Intelligent Design, or whatever it's calling itself these days, needs to keep saying "real soon now!" or the funds dry up. When you're marking time while waiting for a miracle from God it helps to keep the suckers contributors hoping.

[Minimalist]

Specified complexity as it has been advanced by proponents like William Dembski is known to be pseudoscientific.  Its claims to mathematical rigor are false and it depends upon unspecified statistical operations.  Moreover, it's a thinly veiled cover for religious speculations as the unspecified designer is presumed to be God, and not a naturalistic speculation like panspermia.  This takes it outside the realm of legitimate scientific speculation.  At bottom of the specified complexity argument is the analogy that because human designers produce artifacts possessing specified complexity, the existence of specified complexity is an indication of a non-natural process (design).  This ignores the fact that human capacity for design is supposedly naturalistic in origin as having been the product of evolution.

Irreducible complexity is nothing more than an argument from ignorance and thus doesn't qualify as a scientific hypothesis.  It, too, postulates a supernatural designer by necessity.

Contrary to your claim that ID proponents do not push teaching ID in schools, one of the best funded organizations, the Discovery Institute, does just that by promoting its covert campaign to "Teach The Controversy."

Yes, I know they want evolution to be taught as a controversy, but currently are not for pushing ID into public schools.

Ever wonder why the ID assholes aren't also pushing the stork theory for where babies come from?  Why is creationism such a line in the sand?  I don't recall the alleged jesus wasting a lot of time discussing it.  I mean compared to the amount of time he spent driving out "demons."  Maybe we should insist on classes in driving out demons in medical school, too?

[Mr Greene]

Every single claim made by the ID proponents was demonstrated to be utterly false at the Dover trial.
Even the creationists have abandoned it as a failed attempt to slip past the ban on 'Creation Science'.
All the claimed examples of 'Irreducible Complexity' were demonstrated to be false.
All the claims of things being 'unknown' or 'unresearched' were demonstrated to be false.
The ID claimants couldn't put an honest argument together to save their lives.

[The Grand Nudger]

They didn't actually abandon it.  Suffering a high profile defeat simply made them more conservative with their political capital.  They officially* quieted down in the US while diverting more of their funding and efforts overseas as memory of their failure faded here. They'll be back in the limelight if/when they feel they have a moment.

[bennyboy]

Who's the derp who voted "Yes, and has powerful evidence to support it" ?

Derpity derpa derp.

[Rev. Rye]

A Theory is, by definition, is "A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained." Specifically, testable statements that explain phoenomena.

Regardless of the conclusions that Intelligent Design reaches (which tend to be either cribbed from mainstream science or flat-out wrong) or even its falsifiability, it goes out of its way to avoid actually explaining anything. It was developed as a way to introduce creationism (which absolutely never explains exactly what happens when God "Creates" something, except maybe when Young Earthers use it to explain how the Flood made all the canyons and the fossil record, conveniently obscuring its own existence like something out of an episode of Phineas and Ferb) back into mainstream science by removing any specifics about the designer, more or less removing both any coherent substance to it and any explanatory power it may have had. Unless they actually get the balls to explain anything beyond "magic man done it" or the sort of evolutionary bromides they think will keep scientists from seeing it for what it is, it cannot even fulfill the basic requirements of descriptive prose, let alone a theory.

[SuperSentient]

Who's the derp who voted "Yes, and has powerful evidence to support it" ?

Probably one of the theists on this site.