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

My argument isn't that because such a view was acceptable at the time and therefore it is scientific. If this were my argument I should rightfully lose the debate. My argument is that the idea of intelligent design was specifically a scientific as well as a religious view. It was of real scientific value and produced valid scientific predictions about the world. The real difference between the religious view of the idea and the scientific view was the science itself. Even though it seemed to provide us good information as to what the thorns of a plant were to do (keep animals away) or the strong legs of a cheetah (run after prey) or the very impressive speed of a gazelle (run away from cheetah). These things are rightfully in a sort of harmony which the concept of design taps into. Darwin managed to show that this is the net effect of a mindless astounding process. Science filled in the general void of "design" with the actual process which was producing this harmony. I'm saying that intelligent design is the product of the human mind. That we see the 'designs' in nature and this idea fed into the ideas of science and the ideas of religion at the time. Science has since moved after explaining those designs and religion has as religions do, made up more stuff and given a simple by wrong insight divine baggage. Intelligent Design is not the product of religion, it's the product of humanity. It was a valid and acceptable scientific institution and is still the fall back on questions of "why" about the products of evolution. The modern iteration of intelligent design is nothing more than creationism with a cheap dress. Further, the extent of the power of intelligent design was the concept that if one sees something in nature they may clearly speculate that it has a use for the possessor: traits serve purposes (as they would in a designed system) or as Plato wrote in Politics "Nature does nothing uselessly." Though this seems a simple insight it's unquestionably valuable. I am not leaving out any omnipotent designer gods from the concept of intelligent design, there was never an omnipotent designer god in the concept. These are the overarching stretches the religious were inclined to make. You could never get there. Embarrassing problems like "who made god?" and the completely non-sequitur nature of the conclusion popped up when such conclusions were fallaciously drawn. It didn't make scientists of the time any less likely accept the implications as both useful and remarkable. The roots of idea are scientific the tree, however, is imaginary. And it does offer new knowledge: Why do rabbits have strong legs? Why do sharks have sharp teeth? -- they were designed to run, they were designed to eat. We had these answers in time immemorial long before Darwin came up with the "right" answers: they were evolved to run, they were evolved to eat. Although, admittedly there's no purpose to evolution in reality the answer is... that's what better fit that organism into that niche. In this sense, design actually gives us more useful information even though it has the downside of being incorrect. However, being wrong doesn't make something useless it simply matters how wrong it might be. http://chem.tufts.edu... Intelligent design is certainly a broad starting point because it's quite intuitive. It's as obvious as the facts that the moon and sun revolve around the earth, that the stars are set in their places, dropped objects fall, if people bleed too much they die, and life begets life. These might not all be true, but they are all obvious and much of science is determining which bits of obvious right information are really non-obviously wrong. It's not just that they are wrong, but rather how wrong they might be. The sun does seem to move across the sky and in fact I can build a sun dial to tell time. Can you explain a sun-dial easily under the modern interpretation that the earth is just spinning and the sun is mostly staying there. You could, but at a certain point it gets a bit like trying to explain clicking a hyperlink by describing electron flow. You said, "Now it turns out that the scientific community has essentially discarded cold fusion almost to the same degree as intelligent design, but this doesn't change the fact that cold fusion was the product of, albeit faulty science." -- I'm going to actually disagree with you. I think intelligent design is more useful. Even before we understood what caused this or that in organisms of nature we could surmise that they had a function useful to the organism which were designed with that organism in mind. Cold fusion produced nothing. No predictions at all. It was a dead end. Largely the errors and failures of the viewing life at designed helped to give rise to the theory of evolution. Daniel Dennett in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, wrote that "Darwin offered an explanatory path that actually honored Paley's insight: real work went into designing this watch, and work isn't free." Beyond providing some basic metrics by which we could surmise the purpose or organs or the traits of creatures it really was built upon in a real scientific fashion. Further you've hit a remarkable bump in the road within this last round of debate. As it is my job, I'll go ahead and spell it out for you. You attempt to invoke the concept of falsifiability to show that ID isn't science. a quick comparison to evolution "should yield the clear fact that intelligent design is not close to the product of science". Allow me to drop the shoe, as you said in Round 2, "The fact that intelligent design has been obliterated by modern science doesn't make the views of Newton, Euler, and Kepler illogical, because they simply did not know." -- It has been falsified! It's wrong. Nature shows the handiwork of a blind tinkerer through the ages and not of a well-knowing designing intelligence. The designs of nature take real work and nature divided this up into tiny bits of non-genius gradual change pushing one organism above its brethren in the struggle to survive. The core idea as presented by Paley and others was insightful and wrong and shown by science to BE wrong, but not to be useless or non-scientific. You win nothing on these grounds. -- Also, though it doesn't apply as directly to the debate you say that evolution was "totally the product of the strict adherance to the scientific method, the initial hypothesis, and following theory was falsifiable and fully testable." -- I'm going to have to disagree with you there. If you have read Origin of the Species (I recommend you do, it's a great read even today) it's more guess work and explaining how his theory could and even should do these things. How natural selection can do the heavy lifting and why we should believe it can. This is far from the hypothesis, theory, testing paradigm you suggest. He came up with a great idea (I daresay the best idea anybody ever had) and told people how it could work.