Intelligent Design is often criticized for being untestable. There is no experiment, the argument goes, that we can imagine that might give results that could show ID theory to be false. GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent offers a passage from Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe who states that this is the exact opposite of the truth. ID is testable, Behe insists, it's Darwinian natural selection that cannot be falsified:
The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that's just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum.
If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don't expect it to happen, but it's easily falsified by a series of such experiments.
Now let's turn that around and ask, How do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum? If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes, grew the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, well, he'd say maybe we didn't start with the right bacterium, maybe we didn't wait long enough, maybe we need a bigger population, and it would be very much more difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis.
I think the very opposite is true. I think intelligent design is easily testable, easily falsifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.
Eventually it's going to sink into the minds of even the most obdurate that the intelligent design advocates' claim that intelligence is a necessary cause of specified and irreducible complexity is at least as scientific as the claim of the Darwinians that intelligence was neither necessary nor involved in the creation of biological information or the fine-tuning of the universe.
It's interesting that Judge Jones decided a year ago that ID, unlike scientific theories, was not empirically testable and therefore could not be taught in Dover School District science classes, but Darwinism, which rests on the equally untestable claim that intelligent agency had no role in the appearance and development of life, could. Maybe even Judge Jones will someday be persuaded that his judgment was ill-informed.
RLC
