Are you denying that progress has been made in OOL research? What would be progress to you? What would have to be explained for you to accept life arose naturally?
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Science doesn’t claim to have discovered the origin of life. That’s only the ID-Creationists you hear shrilling yelling GODDIDIT! 
Those scientists you whine about were/are in the lab doing actual research and producing promising paths for more investigation. All your DI buddies produce is science-free hot air.
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Origin of life research only really got going in earnest in the late 70s/ early 80s. Before then, there were only a few isolated experiments, not a coherent field of research being pursued by a significant number of people. It may not have been your intention, but I just wanted to clarify that it’s incorrect to suggest that the field has been going for “a century” in a similar way to it is now.
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This is all very good and well (apart from the niggle that this isn’t about arguments but about evidence), but could you perhaps sketch out a possible way in which biological research would reach a firm conclusion of ID in life? You don’t have to provide all the details (I’m generous here, take note), but it should not be a God-of-the-gaps argument. And it should be a way that the biological research community could rally behind, with overall consensus, because it rests on shared empirical evidence.
This is a serious question, because in all these years I still have never seen the outline of such a way. All we ever get is ‘evolution can’t have done it/is highly unlikely to have done it’. Do you even see a possible alternative argument, one that would actually be a positive conclusion for design?
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Yes, unless you call speculations progress.
Several nailed-down steps with no cheating investigator interference.
Exactly what would have to be explained to James Tour, one of the world’s great synthetic chemists.
What is a “nailed-down step”?
So in fact, you know nothing about what is occurring in the field. Okay, good to know.
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Then ID and creationism has been dead for twenty centuries, and should shut up.
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The way James Tour defines what constitutes cheating would make experiments into the origin of life literally impossible. He says that even stepping into the lab, or making a decision of what to put into a flask, is to affect the experiment.
So by definition all experiments are cheating according to James Tour. Even if scientists are trying their best to experimentally simulate a natural environment, for example by having a particular atmospheric gas in a chamber, that scientist will have had to make a decision to include that gas in the experiment, and so is now guilty of cheating according to the principles stated by James Tour.
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The problem, of course, is that given the notions of “science” and “evidence” commonly held by people posting here, it’s hard to imagine any argument for design that would not be dismissed as a God of the gaps argument. Suppose that 10,000 pieces of evidence were amassed for the exquisite arrangements in a particular biological system, arrangements that to the average, common-sense-possessing person on the street would just scream out “there’s no way this happened due to unguided causes; this was designed,” the people here would just say “function doesn’t prove purpose”; and if the number of intricately interconnected parts were doubled to 20,000, the response would be exactly the same. No amount of unlikely arrangement of parts, no amount of apparent fine-tuning with very little tolerance for deviation, would count as a valid argument. It would all be discounted as “God of the gaps” reasoning on principle.
Thus, Denton has now produced 5 books (the fifth already announced as coming out any day now) detailing the incredible fine-tuning and the number of “coincidences” that have to be accepted if organs, systems, etc. arose through purely unguided causes, but nobody here thinks the thousands of details in those books make design even 1% more likely. Nor do they think the earlier arguments of Henderson, Alfred Russel Wallace, etc. make design even the slightest bit likely. So what incentive do ID proponents have to bring into the scientific literature more such evidence and argument? All of it will be dismissed as God of the gaps argument. Given that the playing field is tilted so that the ball could never even in principle score on the Darwinian net, why should ID proponents agree to play the game at all? Why not just focus on winning the war of public opinion?
But suppose you tell me what would count, in your mind, as a well-constructed design argument that could potentially persuade you. You can start with a non-biological example, if you like. For example, if I argued that the images on the plains of Nazca in Peru were causes by natural laws and chance, what you would consider a perfectly valid design argument that should cause me to abandon that belief? Or take Stonehenge or the Antikythera machine or any other example you like, which in your view provides a solid example of “how to correctly infer design.”
(Note: in order to save time, and not go pointlessly over old arguments that lead nowhere, make sure your argument is such that we don’t have to know anything about the designer of the object in order to be sure that it was designed. That is, if your example is the Nazca lines, presume for the sake of argument that we knew nothing about the history or anthropology of South America, that we are tourists from another planet, arriving on Earth without even knowing whether there is or ever was life on earth, and the first thing we saw was the lines. Could be safely infer that they were designed? And ditto for the Pyramids. Could be safely infer that they were designed, if we were aliens with the same degree of ignorance?)
Then, after doing that – presuming that you do it – can you provide us with the sort of argument that would be necessary to infer design of a biological entity or feature or organ or system? What sort of argument would not count a “God of the gaps” argument? In all my years of debating on the internet, I’ve never seen anyone come up with a description of the sort of argument they would find “scientific” and not “God of the gaps.” Without some sort of commitment in advance to what would count as a fair argument, it’s pointless for ID people to keep banging their heads against a slammed-shut door.
It’s not hard to imagine at all. ID-Creationist could present positive evidence for the physical mechanisms The Designer used to manipulate matter, or a timeline for when the Design and manufacturing was done, or a location for the manufacture, or a source of the raw materials used. But no. All we ever get from them is "science can’t explain this to my satisfaction therefore GODDIDIT, sometimes dressed up in sciencey-sounding gobbledygook.
Evolution isn’t completely unguided. Feedback from the environment directs the general evolutionary path of species just as land contours direct the general flow of a river. You ID-Creationists can’t even get the basics of evolutionary theory right yet you claim to have overthrown it. 
The playing field isn’t tilted. ID-Creationists are just too lazy to learn the rules and too afraid to actually get in the game. Much easier to whine and throw rocks from the sidelines. 
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It is difficult to conceive of a stronger tacit concession that this is what the whole thing in the end amounts to, than that statement.
Of course it’s not at all difficult to imagine an argument for design that would not be dismissed as a God of the gaps argument, if you actually started by proposing models that can be compared with data, as opposed to trying to… well you know, argue on the basis of ignorance and unresolved questions in science.
And they’d be right. How they function, or their arrangement, or their number, are not hallmarks of design.
Yeah pretty much, because that’s what it would be. A logically fallacious appeal to some assumed idea of “common sense” held by some nebulous idea of a public that just sort of know how things work by intuition, despite it provably being an unreliable guide to truth, and then another equally logically fallacious appeal to ignorance. The combination of two logical fallacies does not produce a sound inference.
Ahh the good old “unlikely arrangement of parts”, which any arrangement comes out as when calculated after the fact.
Look, if you’re going to sort of imagine how the design inference could be somehow reasonable, can’t you at least try to avoid fundamentally fallacious reasoning even in your hypotheticals?
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You have to start with some testable and potentially falsifiable hypotheses about “Design” then actually test them. Of course that always comes back to forming hypotheses about the capabilities and limitations of the Designer, something which is taboo to ID-Creationists. IXSNAY on the ODGAY! 
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Douglas Axe recently wrote a whole book on how we should abandon the use of scientific evidence and just rely on our intuition that life was “Designed”. So much wrong there it’s hard to know where to start.
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To think of all the particular things that had to happen for this exact rock to be produced. It can’t have been coincidences, clearly there must be some little atom-moving fairies in the crust and mantle to have guided world history towards this result:
The idea that the present is the result of the history that led up to it is not in any conceivable way evidence for design. No matter how history had turned out, one could pick out past events that were crucial to the occurrence of later events, and which if they had been different, results had been different too. An argument that can be made in all possible situations(and yours can) is without any rational force and should convince no-one.
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If it could be proven that most functional proteins are rare and isolated in sequence space, then the observation that a huge amount of functional information has been associated with the transition to vertebrates would lead to a positive conclusion for design.
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No it wouldn’t because we already know of a natural process capable of producing that result. Natural processes can and do produce functional information so merely finding something complex requiring lots of FI tells you nothing of its origin.
I agree, if one could prove that. But that just doesn’t appear to be true.
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I see. So the arrangement of the parts in an automobile is not a hallmark of design? Arrangement can never be a hallmark of design, under any circumstances? Unless you are willing to assert that as a rock-bottom principle, you can’t declare that arrangement couldn’t ever, under any circumstances, be a hallmark of design in the living world. Not without further argument justifying why the inference to design is sound in non-organic cases, but always unsound in organic cases. And I’d like to see you make the latter argument without assuming what has to be proved, i.e., that identified causes of organic change can produce everything ever observed in the organic world.
No, “we” don’t. Not of producing the huge sufficient functional explanation to explain all that we see.
How much? Quantify this, please.