Heaven Path vs. Intelligent Design

I was recently presented with the idea that the Heaven Path philosophy was essentially the same as the Intelligent Design theory.

Due to the person that presented the idea being historically insightful, I took a while to think about it before proceeding with my off-the-cuff response.

The two concepts are similar in that they are not inimical to the existance of a divine creator. Their similarities pretty much stop there, though.

The Heaven Path has as a fundamental tenet that the Divine Creator created the universe with NO unambiguos objective proof of His/Her existence. If we believe in God, our belief must necessarily be based on subjective evidence, that is to say, the presence of our religious feelings.

For this reason, each person must be free to deduce or extrapolate the principle that God wants us to operate under. God's LAWS, on the other hand, are inviolable so there is no need to enforce them, any more than there is a need to enforce the law of gravity (which coincidently is one of God's Laws.)

In the case of Intelligent Design, its promoters seem to want to have it accepted as a scientific alternative to evolution theory. The argument seems to be that there are parts of evolution theory that have not been proven yet, so Intelligent Design, which is also unproven, is just as valid.

Of course, my description of this argument will no doubt be condemned as a straw man, but that is the sense that I have gotten on their argument.

The problem comes in when we ask where the testable predictive power comes from in the theory.

To my knowledge, there have been know testable predictions made based on Intelligent Design theory.

On the other hand, one needs go no further than the study of pesticide or antibiotic resistance to find predictive power from the evolution theory.

The Heaven Path philosophy unambiguously predicts that no testable predictive power will ever be derived from Intelligent Design theory, and so any testable predictive power that IS derived from Intelligent Design theory will invalidate the Heaven Path philosophy.

So I guess they really aren't that similar.