I was very happy to see that Blandus has returned to the ID discussion, and the following is an attempt to clearify my alledged preferential treatment of evolution, which Blandus has called "the most disappointing thing I've ever seen Bob write."

I was referring to the lack of useful results from ID theories which would be required to overturn, or modify current theory. That is, to vastly simplify, ID theories tends to fall into two classes: pointing out inconsistencies or holes in evolution (Behe, Wells, Dembski) , and inferring a designer from fine-tuning and similar (Dembski, Barrow, etc).

For the scientific community to accept a theory of the first sort, there would need to be a predictive element, merely pointing out a gap and throwing in a designer is useless. I've argued with Wells that he needs to get away from simply saying that “bacteria in X experiment didn't evolve” to “based on the fossil record, etc, evolution says that the bacteria should have certainly evolved by N generations”, that is to be seriously considered he needs to attack evolution on predictive grounds. I think that it is fair to say the scientific community is very suspicious that ID's own predictive ability, (and usefulness in experimental design) boils down to playing god of the gaps. When I said that new theories are held to a higher standard, I was specifically thinking of things such as the design of the eye, which it can be argued that evolution cannot explain, but ID can simply explain by inferring design. In the eyes of science, evolution gets a pass on explaining the eye when compared to a theory that merely referring a designer unless there is experimental evidence or a predictive ability to the theory that inferred the designer. (If that isn't clear, I would be happy to expand, but this is running long enough as is.)

Arguments of the second sort are inherently limited in effect, that is, they appeal to areas of science that are bordering on metaphysics. That is, they fall in an area of cosmology, while fascinating (especially to philosophers), is not horribly “hard” as far as science goes, and has relatively little, if any influence over the rest of science; it is to physics what psycho-therapy is to biology. Assuming for a second that I buy the logic used to support the fine-tuning argument, I would have no reason to see it having a practical consequence in science any more than the various theories on the consistency of dark matter change how biological experiments are planned. That is, the fine-tuning argument and its kin have no practical uses. This ties in with my original comment that the vast majority of science is conducted without regard to philosophy.

I will admit to being less that current on the latest literature, but I have yet to hear a practical benefit to ID theory. I've heard lots of vague references to reducing the prevalence of philosophical naturalism, occasional appeals to a desire to unify all of human knowledge, and extremely vague claims that “fixing” science to include elements of design could result in different areas of research, or somehow influence experimental design in a positive sense. Only the latter would have much relevance to the scientific community, and I have yet to hear a convincing, or even complete argument made from it.