Intelligent Design Not Disprovable?

Intelligent Design has been in the news again recently, and Charles Krauthammer has just made it the subject of a disdainful Washington Post column, with Charles Johnson providing an enthusiastic amen corner at LGF. Krauthammer writes:

Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

Now, a complete religious world view may indeed be non-disprovable, and Intelligent Design may in fact be an attempt to refurbish "Creation Science," but is Intelligent Design "tautological" and not "empirically disprovable"? This is, after all, a claim that appears quite frequently. I think, actually, that a significant part of Intelligent Design is disprovable. The following account of an ID argument appears in Wikipedia:

[Michael] Behe uses the mousetrap as an illustrative example of this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces—the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer—all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. The removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Likewise, biological systems require multiple parts working together in order to function. Intelligent Design advocates claim that natural selection could not create from scratch those systems for which science is currently not able to find a viable evolutionary pathway of successive, slight modifications, because the selectable function is only present when all parts are assembled. Behe's original examples of irreducibly complex mechanisms included the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.

This is followed by the following criticism:

The IC (irreducible complexity) argument also assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary, and therefore could not have been added sequentially. But something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary. For example, one of the clotting factors that Behe listed as a part of the IC clotting cascade was later found to be absent in whales[24], demonstrating that it isn't essential for a clotting system. Many purported IC structures can be found in other organisms as simpler systems that utilize fewer parts. These systems may have had even simpler precursors that are now extinct.

Perhaps most importantly, potentially viable evolutionary pathways have been proposed for allegedly irreducibly complex systems such as blood clotting, the immune system[25] and the flagellum[26], which were the three examples Behe used. Even his example of a mousetrap was shown to be reducible by John H. McDonald.[27] If IC is an insurmountable obstacle to evolution, it should not be possible to conceive of such pathways—Behe has remarked that such plausible pathways would defeat his argument.

That sounds like an attempt to disprove a disprovable assertion to me. Perhaps critics of ID just say that it's wrong. Continuing: Why don't they just say that it's wrong? I think there is a certain intellectual bad-faith here: the "not-disprovable" objection to ID reflects a certain desire to shut down the discussion. Whatever its merits, ID has staked out some legitimately scientific territory. Distinguishing chance from non-chance is something that science attempts to do all the time. That being said, my favorite approach to reconciling the Torah and the fossil record is still Omphalism. See the following on Hirhurim, especially the final comments.