The state of ID

So, I had the pleasure of listening to William Dembski today in a context lecture. He is a very educated and bright man, if only Biola could snag him, we would have the corner on the ID movement... :-) Anyway, there seems to be a one major flaw in the ID movement that doesn't look like it will be going away soon...

Almost all major paradigm shifting theories must have a "killer" experiment to prove it's explanitory power. Without this major break through in how to understand the universe, an experiment that could not be explained with any other currently known mechanism, then the theory will likely not hold enough clout to pull people away from a convincing theory. We've seen this many times in science... The photo-electric affect, wave nature of light, relativity, even the heliocentric model of the solar system, all were able to explain a major phenomena that the current model could not explain. The problem seems to be, ID has not yet generated any major experiments, nor has it convinced the scientific world that it's model is insufficient to operate under. On one level, it does seem to be almost strictly a philosophical debate based on scientific data. That certainly does not marginalize the movement. On the contrary, any debate that helps people understand Truth better, especially if it can use the powerful scientific structure that dominates society, it a powerful tool. But, there needs to be some theoretical models that can be built off of this natural philosophy that better explain the world. If this is the case, then the rest of science will have to follow, even if they do so shuffling their feet and calling us names (ie. Christians ;-). We can see how this works with the big bang. It seems today most astrophysicists are at least deists, because the major substantiated theory points towards a beginning and a creator. Well ID, now is our chance! We have the world's attention, we have scared the institution, and we have the truth. Let's start to do real science...

I've heard Dembski has a paper on some research areas that could be explored. If anyone knows where I might get ahold of that, I would be beholden to them.

G'night