Elf Sternberg

It's also a "logical possibility" that the moons of Jupiter are made of green cheese. That doesn't make the proposition "the moons of Jupiter are made of green cheese" to be a viable scientific theory.

The core problem with Intelligent Design is that we humans recognize design because we know that "design" is something humans do; we only recognize artifacts because we analogize from existing artifacts, and we know that only sentient beings design artifacts. So, in order to demonstrate "intelligent design" in nature, one must understand explicitly the designer. But ID explicitly eschews knowledge of the designer and claims that it can detect design without the analogizing. What they claim is impossible.

Secondly, the core of Intelligent Design theory hosts something called the "explanatory filter," which is a way of discerning using information theory whether or not something has so much "information" in it that a reasonable person must assume it was designed by intelligence. The problems with this thesis are severalfold: first, there's so much overlap between "emergent" (biologically functional yet not deliberately designed) and "designed" that "emergent" covers the whole spectrum-- a reasonable person not ideologically wedded to the notion that there must be a designer can accept that all biology can result from non-intelligent processes. Without a sufficient demarcation, ID is fatally flawed.

Secondly, it's a misuse of information theory, which requires a sender, a receiver, and a message-- the information. ID therefore proposes that biology is "a message," but to whom? Us? Future generations? ID doesn't say, and without saying whom, ID is again fatally flawed.

There's a reason why not a single biologist working in the field either uses or expects to use intelligent design theory: it so far has not contributed and nobody ever expects it to contribute to either the theoretical work of expanding the boundaries of knowledge, or provide a foundation for the work of cataloging and corresponding what we learn in the field with the knowledge we have.