Intelligent design cannot prove beyond any doubt that God exists. Ironically, this doubt does not stem from biology, chemistry, physics or even mathematics. The uncertainty is due to man’s inability to accurately observe the universe - its origins, its history, and its extent.

This breakdown of the observable axiom plagues both science and intelligent design because both rely heavily on the observable axiom. Concerning the big bang, Jastrow writes in God and the Astronomers:

Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to farther progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock , he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Jastrow points out that cosmologists can look back to the big bang ( the explosion that happened around 15 billion years ago that created time, space, matter and energy), but that they can never hope to look further back in time because time and space did not exist before the big bang. Thus, science can see evidence of creation but it cannot never hope to assign a cause. This is the bad dream.

Perhaps, more frustrating is that scientists cannot observe the entire universe as it exists today. So while astronomers can estimate the number of stars - there is no way to know if the estimate is accurate. The current paradigm of expanding space states that light from some stars can never reach earth because the space between earth and these distant stars expands faster than the speed of light. So there is no way to even assign a size to the universe. Does it extend to infinity or is it finite? Science does not know, and it is not a solvable problem.

Suppose that there are an infinite number of stars. If this is true, then the low probabilities associated with the origin of life must be multilied by infinity. In such a universe, an infinite number of life forms will evolve by chemical evolution every second. In fact, in such a universe, there is no need for self replicating RNA molecules, because fully formed bacteria cells will evolve (fully formed) in an infinite number of primordial soups. No matter how poor the odds, mutiplying the poor odds by an infinite number of tries will make it happen and the probability will be one.

Given this weakness in our knowledge, intelligent design cannot be used to prove (beyond any doubt) that life was created. So its purpose is more to confront science and evolution by showing that these disciplines do not prove that God does not exist.

Science assumes that if God exists he never does anything that we can directly observe. Intelligent design confronts science on this assumption and offers an alternative. But in the end, all beliefs seem to boil down to faith. Atheists have faith that God does not exist and the rest of us believe that he does. It almost seems that the universe was set up in such a way to prevent man from using science, logic and reason to figure out the truth. Thus, faith will always be necessary.