Resolved: The idea of Intelligent Design is a product of religion, not science.

The basis of intelligent design is a human miscalculation due to the elegance of nature. It really does look designed and people saying that it was is a fairly natural step taken by both predarwinian biological science and the religiously the argument from design. Showing the topic is wrong and properly explaining how, even though it's wrong, the leap of design is both useful and scientific should suffice to meet any burden. I'll take your long winded banter about burdens to mean you know you've lost the debate or at the very least are on the ropes. Being con in the debate I should suffice to simply defend and defeat your claims, however thus far the debate has been completely dedicated to my arguments with simply an assumption on your part that you're right. Further you're trying to nitpick the definition (which is a perfectly acceptable definition) to surmise that I've failed in some way. I am not as you accuse me omitting the "unspecified intelligent agent" but rather noting that it's unspecified. Observe. If one finds a rock in the grass one would be free to surmise that it had been there forever and find that conclusion satisfactory, however if one were to find a well-tuned well-designed pocket watch the same conclusion could not be found satisfactory. The same applies to life. There are more remarkable designs in nature than one could ever find in a pocket watch. Thusly just as there are teams of designers working tirelessly on the design of such watches there must be teams of designers working on nature. The designers must be fairies and those fairies must be plentiful! See, the same argument Paley used applies quite readily to large quantities of fairies. There's a reason the "intelligent agent" is unspecified. Any specification is a non-sequitur. You honestly can't conclude anything other than "unspecified intelligent agent". There isn't an omnipotent designer god there unless you wrongly put an omnipotent designer god there. However, this isn't a deficit to the usefulness of the conjecture in a scientific sense. Long before Darwin we could make astounding predictions about the natural world just speculating that organisms and organs were "designed" for something. The superfluous and fallacious identification of what is rightfully defined "unspecified" in the aforementioned definition is a problem within your appraisal of the hypothesis not mine. My definition is very true to form and doesn't specify any designer because, rightfully, it isn't specified and the truth is long since scientifically known. "As defined, Intelligent design is a conjecture claiming that the universe as a whole was created by an omnipotent power" -- No. Look at the definition! "Intelligent Design- A conjecture claiming that biological life on Earth, or more broadly, the universe as a whole, was created by an unspecified intelligent agent rather than being the result of undirected natural processes. (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intelligent design)" I am being very true to form and not specifying, you're the one begging me to say that "god did it". Or petitioning to 'Genesis' or the core elements of Abrahamic religions. The modern iteration is certainly an attempt to give rise to a unneeded and unwanted theory and allow for such conclusions. I freely admit that. But to say that the theory firmly established in Darwin's head throughout his time on the Beagle, which provided faults and issues providing insight and yet at the same time was still remarkably powerful. The insights of which were honored by Darwin's theory, design takes work and this is something we *need* to explain. It has scientific utility even today even with Darwin's underlying explanation of all of the above. The core take away from intelligent design are probably: 1) Everything in nature has a purpose. 2) The designs of nature take real work. The first is a odd sort of false Panglossian idea which is completely wrong and yet absolutely invaluable. The second is a true insight which did and does feed science. Find something without a purpose in nature and you have yourself a falsified hypothesis. Vestiges meet this definition pretty well but are fairly rare. It also misses a number of real issues in nature like the constantly cooped functionality of parts for other uses. It works well enough to use and make predictions about the world. This is far beyond any actual pseudoscience although the modern practitioners have made that territory well-trodden. Einstein would be nothing without Newton. Newton would be nothing without "the shoulders of giants". Darwin would be nothing without Paley and probably would have gone into the priesthood as his father wanted. - By definition, the unprovable and unfalsifiable (the creator) is a direct contradiction of both the scientific method and the concept of science as a whole. Science doesn't disprove gods or unspecified designers. It tests those concepts and they don't seem to pan out. My wisdom teeth are a horrifically bad design therefore there is no intelligent design. Panda's thumbs are simply cooped wrist bones and that's not the way any real designer would work. My eye has all the wiring backwards making for a large set of problems which any two year old would have designed differently. It isn't that it's untestable, rather it's just wrong. - It is not the product of the scientific method, any testing, a provable hypothesis or an outcome of any debate, it was and is an essentially forced idea not open for discussion. Seeing as the debate and arguments and hypotheses were common for for hundreds of years, this seems a remarkably narrow-sided comment. Read Paley's Natural Theology it was required reading at Cambridge for years (including those when Darwin attended) and is nothing but argument and debate on the subject. In fact, it was the failures of the predictions Darwin made by the light of Paley that puzzled him the most. Why should identical islands have different species, why should the differences of those species be progressive from the distance from the mainland? - To call it a product of science is to put it on par with the great works of scientific literature such as The Origin of Species, which is both ludicrous and insulting. One of the reasons I despise the modern creationist movement is because it demands such over-reactions. Give them a finch and their take a isle. - The idea of an omnipotent power is unprovable, yet believed in, this implies faith witch further implies religion. If I thing that angels pull things to the ground, is gravity religion? - Close to all proponents of intelligent design are religious. So are most politicians, is politics religion? - Tests carried out on psychics doesn't make their predictions works of science. Yes, but psychics are testable (thus far they are epic failures). My point isn't that ID is just flim-flam it actually make reliable predictions. That spikey ball (thagomizer) on the end of that dinosaur's tail must be for something perhaps protection. Further investigation says, yeah that's what it could do. - My opponent has stated that creationism is 'pure religion' while the fact is that creationism and intelligent design are one and the same. In the modern iteration, yes. Historically it was quite valid and a reasonable explanation. Dover found that it was pretty clearly revived from its scientifically valid origins for purely religious reasons and therefore was not acceptable in science classes. None of that damages any of my contentions. ---- Intelligent design isn't of religious origins or really of scientific origins. It's found in the places of nature where we say: hey now isn't that clever why is that like that? From where did such designs come? Prediction, testing, and inspiration makes it scientific. Today the truth makes the idea moot and the religious make it silly, but neither makes the above topic true.