Discovery Institute Promoting New Book: Counting to God

The Discovery Institute is pushing a new book called Counting To God: A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief, a new attempt, by Doug Ell, an attorney (again?) with an undergraduate degree in math and physics,  to meld science and faith. It is purported to be a balanced and fair treatment of evidence for the “Seven Wonders of Science of the New Millennium.” That it is being promoted by the DI makes me wonder how fair the treatment of evolution will be, though, especially since one of the pillars is “New species appear suddenly in the fossil record.” The critiques of Darwin's Doubt (here and here, for example) apparently did not sink in.

In the book, he is said to address scientism (philosophical naturalism) and is quoted in the write-up thus: 

Do you think we live in a meaningless universe, and human beings were created by accident? Or do you think we live in a universe designed and created by a great intelligence, and human beings were designed? Accident or design -- that is the question.

This is a noble question and one that has been addressed by learned philosophers for centuries. And that is the point: it has been addressed by philosophers, not scientists. People can take swipes at evolutionary theory for the next two hundred years and it won't make modern design theory any more robust. You can construct tests to show that something fails to reject the null hypothesis, but you cannot use those results in support of a theory that does not have its own testable hypotheses.

That is where ID fails.