Rational disagreement
Are [Intelligent Design advocates] wrong about that? Probably. But to treat them like pariahs for wanting to examine the question? This is hardly rational.
On my home PC, 24 hours a day, I run Berkeley’s SETI@HOME, a distributed processing system that scans the skies looking through the random cosmological noise for anything that shows signs of being generated by sentient beings. To fulminate that looking for signs of intelligence behind a phenomenon is “unscientific” is to brand the entire SETI project “unscientific.”
To say that it is “unscientific” to look for signs of engineering is also to suggest that no scientist can look at Mt. Rushmore and tell you whether humans carved it or if it was simply the product of erosion. It is to suggest that if paleontologists uncover a 50,000 year old stone hearth with cooking utensils they cannot possibly tell you whether those were the product of natural forces or if people put them together.
All those geologists who claim they can tell the difference between an arrowhead and a funny-shaped rock must not be scientists either, eh?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1121930625.shtml