is it scientific to attribute an event a to cause b where cause b was deliberate designed with some sort of intelligent intent don't answer the questions beyond that well the problem with not answering beyond that is that your example is completely rigged there are several major fundamental problems here first you completely fail to mention the fact that the intelligence behind id is quite literally not of this earth natural science might look at a honeycomb see it is built by bees and then find an odd looking fossilized honeycomb and theorize that it was made by odd looking bees that is fundamentally different than saying it was made by something not of this earth id has at its core the notion that something outside the system we can observe is at cause here this is not science in any sense of the word it is mythology when paul bunyan was having a wrestling match with babe his blue ox they kicked up so much dirt they created the great lakes no evidence of paul and his ox remain i mean really second natural science takes an approach to knowledge that nothing is known scientific law unless it is irrefutable theories must have heavy supporting empirical data to back it up id turns this on its head and does an end run around knowledge and plays games with probabilities if no one can say how flagella on bacteria could have formed naturally how in the hell can id proponents come up with any sort of mathematically accurate probability of flagella naturally forming on bacteria if you don't understand it you can't do statistics on it id jumps right over that hurdle and takes anything that doesn't have a complete detailed natural explanation and jams in their own statistics that say well it's so improbable for this to happen that someone must have designed it this is such a perversion of science you can assign probabilities to something you don't understand id is just making up their numbers finally your example has a b where b was deliberate design that's all well and good for a rigged example except that with respect to life on earth b is unknown your a b example might qualify as forensic science if a were a dead body and b were a bullet in the heart you see a bunch of dead bodies with bullets through the heart the next time you see a body with a bullet through the heart you can probably figure that's what killed him you don't have that with life on earth you have one scenario a and you have no other cases to observe or test so in that sense a b is not scientific if you've never actually observed b btw b is teh intelligent designer which has never been observed so in that sense no it isn't science