Great question- What drives scientific progress?

I find it fascinating when evolutionists say that intelligent design and creation science halt scientific progress. They’re fond of claiming that only a strict adherence to naturalism allows us to cure diseases and create technology, while any kind of belief in God sends us “back to the Dark Ages.” And then I remind them that modern science is the result of a Christian worldview and the work of creationists like Francis Bacon, Luis Pasteur, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, and many others; they were the ones curing diseases and creating technology.

Evolutionists, on the other hand, performed unnecessary surgeries to remove organs they believed were vestigial (leftovers from an evolutionary past). They believed (some still do) the human spine was poorly designed, and, thus, they developed techniques to reduce the curve in the spine, resulting in greater pain and corrective surgery. Their incorrect belief in junk DNA stalled scientific research in this field, while ID proponents and creationists predicted the usefulness of these non-coding areas of DNA for years.

The bottom line is that prejudice and bias against creation science and ID are harmful to scientific progress. Good science should always be welcomed. That’s how progress is made… through a rigorous, unbiased use of the scientific method.

Anyway, this article by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute does a fine job articulating many ways intelligent design “inspires the progress of science” through testable predictions in a variety of fields. I’ve cut-and-pasted all twelve points from the article for easy reference:

• Protein science: ID encourages scientists to do research to test for high levels of complex and specified information in biology in the form of the fine-tuning of protein sequences. This has practical implications not just for explaining biological origins, but also for engineering enzymes and anticipating and fighting the future evolution of diseases.
• Physics and cosmology: ID has inspired scientists to seek and find instances of fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics to allow for life, leading to new fine-tuning arguments such as the Galactic Habitable Zone. This has implications for proper cosmological models of the universe, hinting at avenues for successful “theories of everything” that must accommodate fine-tuning, and other implications for theoretical physics.
• Information theory: ID leads scientists to understand intelligence as a cause of biological complexity, capable of being scientifically studied, and to understand the types of information it generates.
• Pharmacology: ID directs both experimental and theoretical research to investigate the limitations of Darwinian evolution to produce traits that require multiple mutations in order to function. This has practical implications for fighting problems like antibiotic resistance or engineering bacteria.
• Evolutionary computation: ID produces theoretical research into the information-generative powers of Darwinian searches, leading to the discovery that the search abilities of Darwinian processes are limited, which has practical implications for the viability of using genetic algorithms to solve problems.
• Anatomy and physiology: ID predicts function for allegedly “vestigial” organs, structures, or systems whereas evolution has made many faulty predictions of nonfunction.
• Bioinformatics: ID has helped scientists develop proper measures of biological information, leading to concepts like complex and specified information or functional sequence complexity. This allows us to better quantify complexity and understand what features are, or are not, within the reach of Darwinian evolution.
• Molecular machines: ID encourages scientists to reverse-engineer molecular machines — like the bacterial flagellum — to understand their function like machines, and to understand how the machine-like properties of life allow biological systems to function.
• Cell biology: ID causes scientists to view cellular components as “designed structures rather than accidental by-products of neo-Darwinian evolution,” allowing scientists to propose testable hypotheses about cellular function and causes of cancer.
• Systematics: ID helps scientists explain the cause of the widespread features of conflicting phylogenetic trees and “convergent evolution” by producing models where parts can be reused in non-treelike patterns. ID has spawned ideas about life being front-loaded with information such that it is designed to evolve, and has led scientists to expect (and now find!) previously unanticipated “out-of-place” genes in various taxa.
• Paleontology: ID allows scientists to understand and predict patterns in the fossil record, showing explosions of biodiversity (as well as mass extinction) in the history of life.
• Genetics: ID has inspired scientists to investigate the computer-like properties of DNA and the genome in the hopes of better understanding genetics and the origin of biological systems. ID has also inspired scientists to seek function for noncoding junk-DNA, allowing us to understand development and cellular biology.

These are but a few examples to make the point. It may take a while before science is open to scientific progress without bias and prejudice, but we’re making progress.