That’s only because it is. The writings of the leading ID advocates make that clear again and again. See the Dover transcripts for many examples. The notions they use are all straight out of the Creationist playbook. They just try to hide the overtly religious bits, with rather poor overall results.

“It is actually sophisticated and scientific, if also somewhat philosophical.”

It’s not terribly sophisticated, and it certainly isn’t scientific, unless you re-define what you mean by scientific.

“The question of whether the universe is dead or alive is relevant to science. The current trend in science is to assume the universe is non-living, mindless.”

We already know parts of the universe are alive. Does the universe itself reproduce.

“People like Dawkins insist that a non-living universe can generate life, which evolves because of natural selection. He has no evidence for that view, but his arguments are convincing to many people.”

Sure he has. He has this universe.

“And we do NOT have a plausible explanation for the origin of life by random mechanistic processes.”

And do we have a plausible explanation by non-mechanistic processes?

“Science does not have to be materialist, but it has tended to become materialist in recent decades.”

It has to be if you actually want results. And it has been this way for a few centuries, not decades. Before that it was non-materialistic, but resultwise, we didn’t learn so much.

“Atheism and materialism are promoted in many science classes, even though they are philosophies not based on any scientific evidence.”

Every science class. Clearly the atomic theory of matter is atheistic and materialistic.

“Ideas from alternative medicine that depend on a theory of life energy are scorned because life energy cannot possibly exist in a mechanistic, non-living universe.”

No, they are scorned because their proponents are unable to provide any evidence that they actually work. Personal testimonials are the main ‘evidence’, but that’s a pretty thin gruel.

“So promising avenues of research are blocked and minds are closed.”

By all means let you and others like minded show us the results from using this amazing non-materialistic science. Publish in your own journals. Or do we just have to believe.

I think the use of the word “spontaneously” misrepresents the expectations involved in this particular effort. They are clearly looking for ways that an assembly of materials will be predisposed to make a step toward a self-replication process and they don’t expect this to be spontaneous.
In their conclusion they refer to conditions which may have facilitated such predisposition, stating: “- a number of situations could have arisen that would result in the conditions of heating and progressive dehydration followed by cooling, rehydration and ultraviolet irradiation.” This being an example of the motivating forces they understood would be needed beyond the assemblage of the right materials in the correct sequence and stages.

As has been said before, life forms are molecular structures that have acquired the capacity to seek out and compete for energy.

Your experiment has to contemplate a way to give your goo that capacity. The difficulty in designing such an experiment is of course enormous.

And we haven’t even begin to consider the goo’s potential for learning from experience, discovering and acting on the need to replicate in some fashion, etc., etc.

And the way to determine that the result of my experiment was not alive would be by measuring something (i.e. it doesn’t reproduce when you put it in a petri dish). If the criteria was somebody’s strong feeling that there was more to life than predictable chemical reactions, that wouldn’t be worth much.