The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has a great article entitled Intelligent Design or ‘No Model’ Creationism: A Total Fraud And A Scam – Why It Can’t Qualify As Even A Pseudoscience, which, you might correctly surmise, demolishes the whole ID argument. It’s a long read, but it does make the effort to point out the difference between the dictionary definition of ‘theory’ and what the word means in a scientific context, a distinction often overlooked and which makes the ‘debate’ possible in the first place.

Most people tend to think of the word “theory” as meaning pretty much the same thing as their concept of “hypothesis”—namely, a guess or surmise. A “theory” is thought of as a very tentative proposition. This is only natural, because that is the “ordinary English” meaning of the word outside of scientific contexts, and our citizens’ educational experiences have rarely done anything to disabuse them of this notion. As I define “scientific theory,” it is a great, overarching, explanatory scheme which explains a vast number of phenomena; which makes connections between phenomena that would otherwise be perceived as having nothing to do with each other; which makes wild, off-the-wall predictions which nonetheless turn out as forecast; which is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence and has been tested countless times in countless ways without being falsified; shows consilience to a truly remarkable extent; and which is, for all practical purposes, universally accepted by the scientific community. A scientific theory has content, in spades. By this definition (and powerful arguments can be made against any other) there are only about a dozen scientific theories that I can think of right off the bat, and no scientific theories have ever existed which are not currently accepted. Examples would be the modern atomic theory, theory of plate tectonics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the microbe theory of disease, the heliocentric theory, the modern synthetic theory of evolution, the gene/chromosome/DNA/RNA theory of inheritance/protein synthesis.