- Using God as an explanation is disallowed by MN in scientific work.
Agreed.
- ID was originally conceived in the 90s to work around this restriction.
Not sure about this. Steve Meyer traces his involvement in what came to be known (much later) as ID to the early-to-mid 1980s, and his reading of books such as Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (published 1984 – note the date; ID as currently understood lay more than a decade in the future, with Behe 1996, Dembski 1998, etc). My own skepticism of MN owes much more to the anti-demarcationist arguments of philosopher of science Larry Laudan (no admirer of ID) and other philosophers, than to any “work around MN” strategy. Put a question mark next to (2) for me.
- The idea was to discuss an intelligent designer rather than God, design rather than creation, and remove references to Scripture. In fact this was all an attempt to abide by MN.
Definitely no. At a major meeting in Spokane WA, organized by Charles Thaxton in June 1988, on the theme “Origins of Information Content in DNA,” speakers included the agnostic Hubert Yockey, the agnostic Michael Denton, and Roman Catholic, theologically ill-defined folks, and a wide array of Protestant scientists and philosophers – all interested in challenging standard evolutionary theory and OOL scenarios. How to find commonality? Won’t be theology, but a generic notion of “intelligence,” defined as irreducible to physics, would work for discussion purposes. No interest in abiding by MN, given that MN excludes (by definition) any explanatory appeal to intelligence as a basic constituent of reality.
- Pragmatically speaking, this strategy was found not to work. Scientists still invoked MN against ID, much as they did against creationism.
As noted, there wasn’t any “anti-MN” strategy, because being anti-MN falls out naturally from any research program using intelligence to explain (again, where “intelligence” is irreducible to physics). Of course, some scientists still invoked MN, but not all – some said, “OK, we’ll give up MN, but only if you have something better – specific and testable – to replace it with.”
- Consequently there has been a shift in ID. Rather than work within MN, more and more, ID wants to get rid of MN in questions of origins, and are consequently more open to discussing “God” and “creation” in their work, because the earlier strategy of avoiding these words did not work.
No. MN was never a live option for any ID theorist.
- It has seemed to ID that MN is being unjustly and capriciously used against them. Trying to play by the rules did not work, so maybe creationists were right and we just need to get rid of the rule. Looking at organizations like Biologos, it seems the theological price of adopting MN is too high.
Science flourished without MN. Why adopt it now? To keep ID and nasty ideas such as “creationism” at bay. But, as philosopher Steve Dilley has pointed out, MN is held inconsistently by evolutionary biologists and scientists generally. They invoke it when it serves their ends, and ignore it when they want to use theology (see, e.g., Gould’s “panda’s thumb” argument).
- This makes MN the current dividing line, for many, in the origins conversations. It has also renewed energy within ID to attack MN directly,
MN is the current dividing line because the ID community is united by the bare proposition that “intelligent design is empirically detectable in nature.” In order for design to be detectable, of course, it must have some observational or empirical content which does not reduce ultimately to physics. That’s intelligence as a distinct cause, issuing in distinct effects. MN forbids appeals to intelligence (i.e., as a basic or fundamental constituent of reality). There’s the conflict.
I’d suggest you contact Steve Dilley at St Edwards University (Austin, TX), as he is the most knowledgeable philosopher of science currently working on this topic (wrote his PhD on it at Arizona).