What do you mean it fits all data? I can say my car is designed. That fits all data, but it is a fact. If only because I have the testimony of the car dealer and news organizations. Should science be in the business of disallowing facts or theories, simply because it fits?
What do you mean it serves no explanatory purpose? Design works as an explanation in the car example, why not with life? Does either evolution or ID really offer that much in the form of an explanatory purpose? Neither really advances our understanding of anything useful. Advances in biology, genetics, microbiology, etc, could all have come with either or neither of the two theories. Because advances in both are from observations at a lower level. Does faith in evolution advance my doctor's ability to treat the human body? Not one iota. Does it advance my ability to train my dog? Again, not one iota. Name one useful thing that evolution has added to science that couldn't have been discovered in the absence of the theory.
It can't be falsified. It's scientifically useless.
Can't you really say the same thing about evolution? Even when the evidence contradicts evolution, evolutionists just blindly say, there must be some "natural" explanation. Isn't that the same as the creationist saying, there could be either a "natural" or "supernatural" explanation? Does either really contribute to science? But aren't both equally valid theories on our origins?
Obviously your request cannot be fulfilled exactly as stated. It would always be possible to surmise, after the fact, that some discovery might have been reached by an entirely different route than it actually was. However they are innumerable discoveries that were, in fact, made in the context of evolutionary assumptions.
As one example, consider the recent, but rapidly advancing, theory of "fragile breakage". It has long been known that chromosomes have frequently been "rearranged" in the past (pieces of them moved around from place to place, as well as instances of one chromosome being split into two, or two being fused into one) but it was long assumed that the chromosomes broke at more or less random points along their length. The fragile breakage theory asserts that this in not the case, but that chromosomes instead tend to break at specific places.
Fragile breakage was initially suggested by comparing genome sequences of humans, mice and other species. Note that you would only infer such a theory if you believed these species were related by common descent. If you assume they are seperately created, or that their DNA code is specifically "designed," then the best you would find is that the "designer," for reasons unknown, happened to arrange different chromosomes by shifting around more-or-less descrete blocks of code. It's only if you assume that actual rearrangements occured historically that you get the "fragile breakage" theory.
Of course, once you have such a theory you might look to see if chromosomal mutations that occur in living organisms today might fit this pattern, and it was only subsequently discovered, after the evolutionary theory was constructed, that they do. In fact fragile breakage even has medical significance, as it (currently appears that) it may help to explain chromosomal mutations that cause cancer by lengthening teleomeres (structures at the ends of chromosomes that normally gradually "wear away" as the cell divides) thereby interferring with programmed cell death.
What do you mean it fits all data?
Exactly what he said. What field observation, fossil, or lab test is inconsistent with creationism/id? If there aren't any, the hypothesis (not theory) is vacuous, incapable of making any predictions. How do you test whether a theory is consistent with observation if there's no way it could fail?
PH: It can't be falsified. It's scientifically useless.
DannyTN: Can't you really say the same thing about evolution?
Absoutely not! There are thousands of ways evolution could have fallen had the data been different: EG:
A precambrian rabbit fossil.
An elephant fossil in Hawaii
A pseudogene in a chimp and an orangutang but not in a person
A 'missing link' between birds and mammals (don't get your hopes up, the platypus bill only looks like a bird's)
A pseudogene in a cow and a whale but not in a hippo.
Does either evolution or ID really offer that much in the form of an explanatory purpose? Neither really advances our understanding of anything useful. Advances in biology, genetics, microbiology, etc, could all have come with either or neither of the two theories.
Really? How would an ID-er explain the above facts? How would he come up with new tests for his 'theory'? ("If a pseudogene is found in x and y, it must also be in z.")
Standard biology uses common ancestry to make predictions of this form; it is hard for me to believe that any creationist/id-er would say, with a straight face, that cows and whales *should* share genetic material. Duane Gish used to make fun of the idea that they were even related! (he probably still does)