Can't ID be tested AT ALL?

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What I was getting at is: although they apply this kind of design-oriented thinking, they WON'T accept "intelligent design" as an endpoint to work towards. They will always intend to break down the answer "designed" into smaller constituents.

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"It appears designed, but HERE are the deeper reasons/mechanisms WHY/HOW it comes accross as intentional design"

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ANY "deeper understanding of biotic reality" comes from the second part of the sentence. The 'conclusion' design in itself is useless as long as it doesn't lead to meaningful research behind it.

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I don't think that "intelligent design" should be an endpoint to work towards though, even if a person believes God is the Designer. In Ancient Egypt, Middle Age Islam, etc, we see this scenario. They studied the world and marvelled at it as God's creation and God's work of Genius. The deeper you go, the more you go wow. It's a little simplistic the way I put it but, that approach wouldn't stop scientific progress. That's why I specified in another thread that the conflict between science and religion doesn't occur in alot of other major cultures and civilisations. This dichotomy emerged from the Church's persecution of science. But if it wasn't for that, I don't see how religion and science are a problem. Especially when it's understood that religious writtings are meant to be primarely allegorical, moral and spiritual. In other cultures outside the West, science was a way to bare witness to God's greatness. No big issues like what happened with the Church.But in a recent book published by certain Bishops of the Catholic Church, called Gift Of Scripture, they say:
“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision"If only that had been published when Galileo was around, we wouldn't be in this mess today.

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Testability of ID is not a logical impossibility, if only because ID itself is not logically impossible. We ourselves are living proof of that: we have made lots of intelligently designed objects. (An alien could have an ID hypothesis about one of the probes we sent out into space. It could test this hypothesis by following the path of the probe in the opposite direction and find us.)

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Now, if something is not logically impossible, then it can be true. And if something can be true, then, if it is true, it is logically impossible to prove it untrue.

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Science works on the basis of hypotheses that are constantly under scrutiny, to see if some way can be found to disprove them. But scientific hypotheses are only scientific because these ways to disprove them can be formulated at all.

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For ID, no one has ever formulated a way to disprove it. So, although ID is a logically possible hypothesis, it is not a scientific one until some test has been proposed that could prove it false. And such a test would have to be concerned with the defining tenet of ID, namely that life is too complex to have arisen without the help of an intelligent designer.

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The question is thus whether such a test can ever be formulated.

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Parasomnium,
I can't tell how much I like the way you formulated that..

sorry, forum rookie's mistake..