If the decision in Dover goes against ID, I think that will effectively kill ID as a scientific enterprise...I wince at the first sentence. ID has never been a scientific enterprise. He is right, though, that ID disapear as a political enterprise.
ID will find itself reduced to the same position as creation science in the late eighties. Once it became clear that the courts weren't buying the subterfuge, creation science prety much stagnated. Nowadays you hear very little about it. In the early eighties creation science was sufficiently menacing that high-powered scholars like Niles Eldredge, Phillip Kitcher and Douglas Futuyma though it worthwhile to write books on the subject. Who would bother doing likewise today?
This does not mean its shadows will not be shown for a long time to come. I've talked to a couple of evangelicals for whom "Intelligent Design" has replaced "creation science" in their vocabulary, even if their idea of "Intelligent Design" is that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. Perhaps it sounds more scientific to them. Intelligent Design may get staying power from it's vagueness - fundamentalists think it means Gensis is true, more secularized folk think it just means some supernatural force had a hand in their somewhere. Also, I don't remember the 90's as a time when creation "science" was dead. It may not have been well, but I had a friend trying to show me a Dr. Dino film and saw plenty of letters to the editor on the subject. Dover may be the end of attempts to teach ID, but it is likely to survive in the cultural mind for the forseeable future - at least until someone comes up with "Biological Teleogics."
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Being a biology professor at a Canadian university, the evolution/creaton debate comes up every year, and I can confirm the fact that Creation Science is NOT dead. It may not be in the headlines like it use to, but it has a grassroots movement that is enormous in size.
I am also witness to the fact that much of what we see about the debate between evolution and creation (or ID) is essentially religious. Few of the opponents on either side understand what the debate is really about. It is about what we WANT to believe, not what we HAVE to believe.
Will ID survive? You bet your life on it. It will never die. Although reworked to address a modern world, it is still as compelling an argument as it was when William Paley first used the "Watch on a path" analogy. And to ensure that it gets even more widely known, just ban it from the schools!
But is it science? I say yes, but as long as it challenges naturalistic evolution, the courts of the land will label it religious.
I have never had trouble refuting evolution in any of my university biology courses. Why? Because I stick to the scientific understanding of what evoluton really is. Once the religious nature of evolution is known, it is much easier to bring in other "religiously-based" scientific theories such as ID and Creation Science.
If you are interested in learning more about me and my experiences, google "Gary Chiang evolution."
To the extent that design detection in nature can be explained by natural laws and evolution, ID becomes a philosophical fine-tuning argument. This in not to say that fine-tuning arguments can't be interesting or even compelling. Though fine-tuning arguments use Science and scientific concepts, they cannot truly be Science, since there can be no testability. Science doesn't really need them.
To the extent that design detection in nature can only be explained by the intervention of intelligent designers with natural law, ID can be Science. But it has a tough road to hoe, and the only way that I can see ID actually gaining a stronghold within the Scientific Community would be by presenting a model that 1) shows that abiogenesis is not possible, via an understanding of evolvability, and 2) proposing a model of what the seed for first life must have looked like, and how that initial configuration provides explanation for the trajectories of life that we've actually seen.
If life was indeed seeded, and if it indeed required nano-technological engineering to accomplish the seed, then I have faith that the rationality of Science will ultimately enable it to come to that conclusion.
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