Did Douglas Axe Disprove Evolution? Spoiler: No

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Thacker

It seems odd this hasn’t been explored, rather assumed like a religious dogma that no-gods-allowed must be the default position? I mean, we have countless examples of ID guiding the evolution of machines, specifically systems which are highly reliant on informational management. Perhaps I’m missing something, hopefully the Naturalists have some explanation?

It has been explored at great length Or maybe it would be better to say this is the key failing of Intelligent Design; there is no hypothesis for design or a Designer which would allow any distinction between evolution and design. I think it was Dembski who famously said, “ID is not that kind of science.”

Two possible exceptions:

1. Winton Ewert Dependency Graph hypothesis, which even the ID proponents aren’t too excited about.
2. Several examples in mainstream science demonstrating how phylogenetic data can be used to test Common Descent versus specific design alternatives. These examples are (Theobald 2003?) and White (2012) if memory serves. In both cases the Common Descent hypothesis is a clear winner against separate origins hypotheses. The main point of both publications is not to test Common Descent, but to demonstrate how Design hypotheses can be tested using mainstream methods. Other Design hypotheses should also be testable, but to date no one in ID has taken up these methods.

@Thacker

Just wondering, how would they be distinguishable? It seems to me we distinguish ID creations from Naturally formed creations daily… generally using probabilities. Like this very post, sure… its possible a random letter generator might have, by pure chance, generated every single letter in this post, but we both know, that’s not what happened, right?

This sort of probability approach can be used to show that humans are/were very likely the authors of the posts in this thread. The critical point is that we already know that humans exist - we infer that humans wrote these posts very easily, but we are not inferring the existence of humans because that is a starting assumption.

The same of not true of an Intelligent Designer that is not previously known to exist. We have nothing to show A Priori that a Designer exists in the way we know humans exist. If we look at probabilities in the same way as posts in this thread to infer Design, that is also a (tacit) starting assumption.

I should note that if we were to simply pose a hypothesis for the existence of God, this would be a non-starter. If we are agreed that God is supernatural, then is simply should not be possible to have scientific proof of God, because that’s just not how science works. This is not a point of disagreement anywhere.