Hi Ben,
You aren’t the only person who thinks that Meyer and I missed responding directly to Murray and Churchill. That whole EPS session was a lot of talking past each other.
But I couldn’t bring myself to write, or deliver orally, a response to Murray and Churchill (M & C) which took as given the assumptions in their approach which I see as highly disputable – in particular, methodological naturalism (MN). As I said above in this thread, MN represents the genuine dividing line between TE and ID (more about that below). While M & C said in their long (16,000+ word) defense of TE that they weren’t assuming MN, in practice, they were. I have no interest in playing in a game where the rules have been rigged against me, and Meyer, from the start. For Steve Meyer, marrying Christianity to a dying theory (neo-Darwinism) is a bad idea on all counts. So we talked about what matters to us – and left much of the audience wondering why we didn’t take up the issues as defined by M & C.
ID is fully compatible with universal common descent (UCD), which explains why I can work with Mike Behe, Michael Denton, Günter Bechly, and other DI senior fellows or affiliates (some of whom I cannot name, for their own safety) who accept UCD. What defines ID? The reality of mind or intelligence as an empirically detectable cause. This can be the case, as a matter of empirical content and scientific method, with UCD or ~UCD as a separate question concerning the best geometry or topology of relatedness for the history of life. So Mike Behe and I have had a nearly 30-year disagreement about UCD, yet consider each other colleagues in thinking about ID.
ID is not compatible with MN, which rules out the very thing – mind as a real cause – which makes ID distinctive.
So if you’re doing your taxonomy of positions on origins, watch for MN. I think you will find classifying views with MN as the key diagnostic will give you “natural” groups. To use the jargon of cladistics, MN is the synapomorphy defining TE, when compared with ID. In all current versions of TE that I’ve examined, design is never empirically detectable.