Scientific Utility and Explanation Power of ID

Welcome ID doesn't necessarily assume such a barrier. For instance, an intelligent being could have designed and built the first protocell and planted it here on earth and the rest of life unfolded just as evolutionary theory suggests it did.However, the big problem is that there is virtually no work being done to support Intelligent Design in the positive. Instead, it basically takes its strategy from creationism and tries to disprove evolution. What are the flagships of the ID movement? Irreducible complexity. The eye could not have evolved from simpler functional units, so therefore ... ID. etc, etc, you know the drill.So the question becomes this, what criteria could we establish that could only be true of an intelligently designed universe? What could we know about the designer (assuming that this is indeed not a religious exercise that prescribes to know about a particular deity or creator) that we could confidently assert would be true about our universe that would be true if and only if it were designed by this unknown force?I would say that on the surface ID has some appeal, but there is really no substance to it. It may as well be creationism, just with open ended parameters. I think to some it offers a seemingly legitimate compromise between their religious belief and the overwhelming evidence produced by science. To me though, when it is presented as some unknown designer, it fails to provide any religious benefit and when it presents the science in such a way as to say "no point looking further than this because it was designed" it fails to provide any scientific benefit. So it just doesn't seem to provide any benefit. Again, ID doesn't necessarily have the barriers you indicate, but in general, it doesn't make useful predictions or provide useful explanations.However, there was a member here who did a really good job of presenting some testable hypotheses related to intelligent design. You could read through them if you would like. Revisiting the Type III secretion system
Towards a Hypothesis of Molecular Design
Nature's Engines and Engineering
Deep Homology and Front-loadingHBD