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The old analogy is that if you see a working clock then you assume someone designed said clock and that it did not spontaneously occur. The thing is, you cannot draw many conclusions beyond the simple existence of the clock maker. Was it a man, woman, or maybe even a machine? Was it a moral person or a mass murderer? There is no evidence from the created thing to suggest any of this- only that the maker exists.


Bzzzt. The flaw in your logic is that we know man makes clocks (we have evidence of that) but we don't know that anything made man, or even that anything made anything which led to man.
Ok, well you left out my next line:

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The only question ID really asks is whether or not our existence and the world around us equate to the clock.
I mention this because you make it sound as if I'm an ID proponent ("The flaw in YOUR logic"), which I'm not. I just haven't really heard the issue truly disccussed in the terms it was origionaly presented. Your argument about the knowledge that man makes clocks is a good answer to this latter statement, though I don't really think definitive. I'd like to hear more disccusion.

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Science always starts with a question (who made the clock, or the Universe) and it's fine to come up with alternate hypotheses to test. But unless you have means to test them, to turn those hypotheses into theories and eventually into scientific fact,
Not all scientific observations are testable. We have no way to test the Big Bang theory, yet it is still in the realm of science, though it is certainly not presented as fact. We have made observations about the universe and created a theory that fits what science is telling us, a reasonable and scientific approach.

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the ID hypothesis deserves as much time as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Science classes aren't concerned with the teaching of every theory that's remotely possible (such as the clock spontaneously materializing, or being put there by aliens.) Science classes are for teaching theories that have at least a modicum of evidence, a metric that Intelligent Design falls short on.
I don't think this is true. Science tells us that we exist in one of the most ideal planets in the galaxy, universe, and solar system. Science tells us that the laws of physics that govern us are perfecly suited to support life. There are many other scientific observations that align with the premise of ID, something missing for the FSM. Have you looked at the scientific backing for ID? It's certainly there- the question is whether it means what ID proponents say it means.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.