Also, here is a short, readable article by Nagel laying out his view that mental properties are an essential, and unexplored feature of our universe.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of...
However, it is possible to separate the theories from the apologetics, as mainstream science has done.
The Discovery Institute itself is run by a mix of atheists, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. All whom are involved because they think there is a real scientific problem. Many of them do use ID to further argue for religious conclusions, but the theory itself is religion agnostic, and is also compatible with atheism, as demonstrated by the atheists and agnostics involved.
I would suggest you not dismiss the theory itself merely because of your dislike for the religion of many of its proponents. Doing so is the genetic fallacy. Additionally, some of the earliest proponents of ID type arguments, such as Paul Davies and his fine tuning argument, are not themselves Christians.
At any rate, you seem to be saying you have not read any of the relevant papers. I encourage you to look at least at one of the papers I mention (not just the criticisms others have written), and make up your own mind as to its validity. Most are free PDFs hosted online, and are not very long reads. The game of life paper is the most accessible, IMO. You can even reproduce the results yourself if you become interested enough. At that point, you'll be in a better position to dismiss the work.
Even though I agree with you on flat earth being a pseudoscience, I have at least read some of their arguments to see what they are claiming. Same with 9/11 truthers and holocaust denialists. I at least read their arguments, so I can debunk their arguments myself. There is always the possibility that some position I vehemently disagree with might be correct.
I'm not sure why you mention this as a contrast. Macro evolution also does not follow the scientific method as there is no repeatable experiment you can design to falsify the hypothesis. This is well-known among evolutionary biologists.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution
- https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_48
- https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/macroevolu...