Hi Eddie,
Thanks for your extensive response. Even as a scientist, I am a big fan of natural theology. I appreciate the various arguments for the existence of God - Aquinas’ Five Ways, the kalam cosmological argument, fine tuning, and so on. So I believe we are in mostly in agreement with regards to whether natural theology is a legitimate enterprise, theologically and philosophically speaking. For me however, all of these arguments are philosophical. Even if some of their premisses can be bolstered by scientific arguments (e.g. Craig’s use of the BVG theorem to support the proposition that the Universe had a beginning), the actual argument is a philosophical one, crucially depending on metaphysical premisses that must be argued using philosophical arguments, not empirical ones.
Scientific vs. Philosophical Natural Theology
In general, I am usually very suspicious of purely scientific arguments of natural theology. This is why I am unconvinced by arguments from ID advocates. Now, if they changed their arguments for Design to be purely philosophical, I could be more open to those. But then these arguments would be more similar to arguments from fine-tuning or the argument based on unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing nature. An example of such an argument would be, for example, an Aristotelian-Thomist arguing that evolution requires a change of substantial form that needs input from outside, that can only come from God. (This is adapting an argument from Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, a noted A/T and evolutionary biologist. Note that this is AFAIK somewhat opposed to Fr. Chaberek’s Thomistic arguments against evolution.) Because natural science doesn’t study substantial form in the A/T sense, it has nothing to say directly about the soundness of the argument. If this is all that you are advocating for that I’m all for it.
The Importance of Methodological Naturalism in Science
So why am I suspicious of scientific natural theology arguments? You’ve probably heard this a lot, but as a scientist I think methodological naturalism (MN) in science is important. In my view, MN is not a form of dogmatic temporary deism or atheism. Instead, MN demands us give very specific, mechanistic, measurable (in principle) definition of every concept. This allows us to conduct experiments testing that concept. Popper was not right in everything, but he was right in identifying falsification as a very important aspect of empirical science. Without MN, all kinds of untestable claims are allowed to enter, and it becomes more and more difficult to do science.
Now I have tried to express this during my exchange with @jongarvey, but it seems that most people who do not work primarily in empirical science don’t seem to understand how important this is. Empirical science today, at least the simple, experimental kind that I do everyday, always assumes methodological naturalism! Perhaps we can start a separate discussion about MN between scientists and theologians if this is controversial.
Applying MN to the case of ID, design arguments can only work as actual science if we can get a rigorous, objective, measurable definition of design. In addition, this has to be a positive definition that stands on its own, instead of negative arguments that only attack the legitimacy of existing theories. That is not how science works, period. Now, this seems hard to come by in ID literature. Even watching @swamidass’ debate with Eric Holloway the other day as an interested layman, the discussion seemed still focused on negative arguments against the sufficiency of evolution to explain the amount of information in DNA, and Eric was using handwavey terms like “function” which in my knowledge do not have a rigorous, measurable definition.
Is Design a Miracle?
With this in mind, I was particularly interested by this statement of yours:
I can only agree with this if you are referring to design in the philosophical, perhaps metaphysical sense. I would support you in arguing, for example, that the beauty and effectiveness of the laws of physics must have been designed by some external mind. Such an argument is never undermined no matter how much more science we discover. I could also support you in arguing that the fine-tuning of the universe to support life is a form of Divine Providence.
However, from a strictly scientific perspective, the quoted statement is problematic because while “divine intervention” has a pretty clear definition (i.e. “a scientifically unanalyzable, temporary departure from regularity”), “design” does not yet have a clear definition. I’m not even sure if it has a rigorous, non-circular philosophical definition. This is why your paragraph-long explanation of “design detection”, while convincing to common sense, would not make sense to a scientist qua scientist, no matter how many philosophy classes they take.