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Defining science

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science." The U.S. National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience. Others in the scientific community have concurred, and some have called it junk science.

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. The boundaries between what is and what is not to be considered science, known as the demarcation problem, continues to be debated among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. For a theory to qualify as scientific, it is expected to be:

• Consistent
• Parsimonious (sparing in its proposed entities or explanations, see Occam's Razor)
• Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena, and can be used predictively)
• Empirically testable and falsifiable (see Falsifiability)
• Based on multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
• Correctable and dynamic (modified in the light of observations that do not support it)
• Progressive (refines previous theories)
• Provisional or tentative (is open to experimental checking, and does not assert certainty)

For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, and ideally all, of these criteria. The fewer criteria are met, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a few or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not scientifically useful, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, provisional or progressive.

Critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the Daubert Standard, the criteria for scientific evidence mandated by the US Supreme Court. The Daubert Standard governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. Its four criteria are:

• The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified.
• The methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• There should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating the results.
• The methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, using these criteria and others mentioned above, Judge Jones ruled that "... we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents".

At the Kitzmiller trial, philosopher Robert T. Pennock described a common approach to distinguishing science from non-science as examining a theory's compliance with methodological naturalism, the basic method in science of seeking natural explanations without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural. Intelligent design proponents criticize this method and argue that science, if its goal is to discover truth, must be able to accept evidentially supported, supernatural explanations. Additionally, philosopher of science Larry Laudan and cosmologist Sean Carroll argue against any a priori criteria for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. However, Laudan and philosopher Barbara Forrest say that the content of the hypothesis must first be examined to determine its ability to solve empirical problems. Methodological naturalism is therefore an a posteriori criterion and procedural necessity of science, due to its consistent results.