By first determining if either model cannot be true. So how do you make that determination, without an observation? Or is it a faith-based determination?

Meaning that a single... why would it have to be only one? relativity came up with a number of (difficult) tests to be done and we are knocking them off one by one. ...observation in and of itself could *prove*... "support or dispute" would be a less absolutist way to put it ...creation or evolution? These models may not even be mutually exclusive of each other, particularly when one theory postulates miracles. Agreed, depending on what the truth is. Would it not be beneficial to put limits on what the IDer could or could not have done? So that you could say with authority something like: "If there was an intellegent designer, everything he designed was (or was not) consistent with Darwin's work."

I'll go you one step further: I would assert that no observation can *ever* prove miraculous creation false. One flavor of miraculous creation, yes. Other flavors, no. For instance, I think the evidence is good that there was no IDer who created life on earth some few thousands of years ago, who also gave no care to whether his fingerprints would be found by his creation.

Evolutionary theory - even assumed as a fact - does not disprove intelligent design. If you can assume evolution as fact then that would severely constrain the sorts of IDer, there might be. If someday, at the very end of science (whatever that might mean), we are left with the statement that either there was no IDer or an IDer who miraculously created life to follow it's own evolutionary path, or an IDer who created us in an instant to look exactly as if we had followed an evolutionary path to get here, then that will be more than we know today. On the other hand: what if we actually find fingerprints?

And I don't see any reason why ID should be handled scientifically instead of philosophically. Where does ID help us if there isn't an IDer? Where does evolution theory help us, if we were designed? Anyway, it's not about "help"; its about truth and a truthful approach.