Matthew Yglesias, "Kuhn and Intelligent Design" (2005)

Having thought about it some, I think the argument is actually rather straightforward. In Kuhnian terms, what Darwin did was "revolutionary science" -- he laid out a new paradigm for thinking about biology, the relationship of species to one another, and their origins. Kuhn points out that it's entirely typical of enterprises in revolutionary science that they don't really explain all the data. Instead, you have "anomalies" -- bits of data that don't obviously fit into the framework. Any honest appraisal of The Origin of Species needs to concede that there were, in fact, a lot of anomalies left by Darwin's initial formulation of his theory. Most notably, there were massive gaps in the fossil record and a lot of hand-waving associated with the account of how inheritance worked. On top of that, while Darwin did rebut the "watchmaker" argument with specific regard to the development of the human eye, there were many other apparent cases of "irreducible complexity" that Darwin didn't take on.
> <br> To the IDers, all this is supposed to show that Darwin was doing dubious work that we should be suspicious of. A Kuhnian, however, understands that this is entirely typical of revolutionary science. Copernicus, Einstein, Newton, and all the great names of science did work that was similarly problematic. Or, rather, not problematic at all. These are the great scientists of human history -- that's what great scientists do.
> <br> The reason we regard them as great isn't that their own work was free of anomalies, but that the paradigms they proposed were fruitful for doing what Kuhn called "normal science" -- applying to new paradigm to solve problems.
> <br> In the Darwinian case, post-Darwinian biologists (and others) kept doing research on these problems and progressively started solving them. We've found more and more fossils and consistently been able to fit them into a Darwinian framework to enhance our understanding of the history of life. Mendel's work was rediscovered, found to integrate very well with Darwinism, and launch a fruitful line of research into genetics. We were then able to further improve on Mendel's account with the development of molecular genetics, the discover of DNA, and all the bits of work that have come out of that. Beyond the human eye, scientists have had occassion to look at many, many other putatively "irreducibly complex" traits and propose Darwin-consistent accounts of their origins.
> <br> The upshot of this is that a Darwinian need not deny that, as IDers claim, the Darwinian account remains to some extent incomplete. What we claim for ourselves is that while it was initially promising it was, at the time, very incomplete and has steadily grown less and less incomplete. Therefore, the mere fact that some anomalies remain is hardly a decisive refutation. Many scientists are still working on these problems, expanding our command over the natural world, and we have good reason to anticipate that they'll continue to succeed.
> <br> Similarly, the brute fact that ID has a lot of problems doesn't refute it. The problem with ID is that, unlike real revolutionary science, it doesn't lead to any normal science. There are no ID-based research programs. Nothing has never been accomplished by applying the ID paradigm to a question in biology. All ID's scholarly (and "scholarly") proponents do is try to offer half-assed refutations of Darwin. You can quote Kuhn all you like, but you're not doing revolutionary science unless your purported revolution leads to some normal science. Intelligent design does not.
> <br> At the end of the day, I think this Kuhnian approach to the question is not only a more accurate account of ID's problems than a more naively positivistic one, but it puts the evolutionist on stronger ground. Let me quote the end of Noam's article:

When a proposition is empirically false, as both creationism and ID (to the extent that it makes empirical claims) are, you're free to assert its truth; you just can't call it science. The creationists had no problem with this; they just rejected any science that contradicted the Bible. But the IDers aspire to scientific truth. Unfortunately, the only way to claim that something empirically false is scientifically true is to question science's capacity for sorting out truth from falsehood, the same way postmodernists do.

I think that gets at the crux of the issue in a lot of ways. In some sense, it's not possible to demonstrate that creationism is mistaken. God -- being omnipotent -- could surely make the evidence come out whichever way He might see fit. The thing you can say about both creationism and intelligent design is that they're not science. That, however, depends on recognizing that science is fundamentally a social practice. Creationists refused to conform to the norms of that practice. IDers have managed to superficially ape the norms of the social practice but are not, in fact, participating in it.
> <br> This is something that you really can conclusively demonstrate. By contrast, if people simply choose not to accept the conclusions of science, there's really nothing you can do to stop them or to refute them. But you can say, both logically and politically, that what ought to be taught in science classes is science, that there are standards as to what constitutes science, and that intelligent design isn't it.