Why not just answer the question?

It occurs to me that the objections to intelligent design are from slightly differnet camps. One is scientists who fear that it will supplant teaching of evolution, which I very much doubt. The other is people who see such teaching as an intrusion of religion into government, which I think is also overblown. Then there are people who just don't like the idea of some intelligence out there which could have designed all this and shepherded its development, because they fear the implications of such an idea.

Ed Larson is quoted as follows:

Intelligent design, despite its proponents' claims to the contrary, isn't modern science. It's part of that rebellion against it. Scientists look for natural explanations for natural phenomena. Their best explanations, if they survive rigorous testing, become scientific theories.

Intelligent design, in contrast, is a critique of all that. Its proponents may challenge the sufficiency of evolutionary explanations for the origin of species but they have not — and cannot — offer testable alternative explanations. The best they can offer is the premise that, if no natural explanation suffices, then God must have done it. Maybe God did do it, but if so, it's beyond science.

This doesn't sound like science to me. He's saying that once scientists have announced a theory, the burden shifts to doubters to prove it wrong, not just by asking more about how the theory works, but by proposing "testable alternatives." But it doesn't really work that way when other scientists critique some theory. They pose objections all the time, without being told that they have to prove otherwise. And the easiest thing in the world is to define terms so that they don't allow any alternatives. That's why the "it's not science" objection is misleading. If sounds more like, "I'm a scientist and I have this theory, which explains the evidence we have, but you're not allowed to criticize it unless you can affirmatively disprove it. And any other explanation isn't science by definition."

I would really like to know how the statistical analysis of the many random mutations in the proper series to result in the present profusion of life. I read somewhere that the chances against the proton being stable are greater than the number of atoms in the universe, or was it possible combination of the atoms in a single enzyme that life depends on. The answer would be that, since we see all this complexity and luck, the probabilities worked out in our favor, and for all we know there are an infinite number of parallel universes in which no life exists. Still, it strikes me as more like the number of times you could flip a coin and have it land standing on edge 10 or 100 times in a row. There's some possibility, but how long would we have to live to witness it? As I've noted before, scientists are always showing us rocks they claim were made by early man as tools, and I take their word for it that Clovis points don't just occur naturally. But why doesn't that beg the question of why they don't apply the same logic to, say, DNA coalescing out of the primeval soup?

If evolution is so solid, why shouldn't it be possible to explain this to our schoolchildren without just saying this is how it had to be. Aren't some bright kids likely to ask the question? And do we really want to teach science by telling them to just take our word for it? You don't have to endorse religion to answer it scientifically. I suppose you could say that the ods against it are irrelevant because the fossil record proves what happened, but that strikes me as evasion. The worst way to answer honest questions is to get irritable and accuse the one who asks them of trying to violate the separation of church and state.