What does it mean to say some cause or phenomenon is supernatural, and how would it behave if it was natural instead? I’ve never quite understood what distinguishes the categories here.
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The cause that ID has identified is a known natural mechanism (mind) that did not appear to exist in the natural world during the origins of unique life forms and can explain the observation of functional information or the bigger category purposely arranged parts.
Show me this mind. Where is it? How does it work? What did it design (or not design)? When did/does it operate? Why does it (not) act the way it does?
ID cannot answer these questions. OR in one case it tried (Ewert 2016) but has never succeeded. As I said, an empty question, asking nothing useful and giving no answers.
How is ‘mind’ known to be a mechanism of what?
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Hi Dan
I agree these questions are the limitation of ID with the exception of what did the mind design (or not design).
This is a useful question for science to parse out. The question should be re worded to ask what did the Designer directly design (or can be explained by natural laws).
Using random change along with known biological mechanisms appears to have some utility but falls short of explaining biodiversity. This tug of war using design as the alternative hypothesis is very useful IMO.
A mechanism that can help arrange parts and produce functional information. We are testing it as we exchange ideas. I will stipulate that a mind that we observe requires a body in the natural world to function.
By what force does this mind arrange parts?
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If the only known examples of minds require bodies then you can’t claim to ‘know’ that minds do anything, only that bodies (or minds with bodies) do things. So ID doesn’t have a known mechanism, it has unfounded and evidently impossible conjecture.
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This is the counter argument but I find it deficient for several reasons. We don’t’ understand exactly what gravity is but we can create a predictive model of how it works as its function can be empirically demonstrated.
We don’t know exactly how a human mind or Divine mind works but we know by experience that it is capable of conceptualizing how to process and analyze information and conceptualizing how to arrange parts for a function that we can assign a reason. Overall it is able to generate complex concepts on its own.
The objection that we cannot hypothesize that a mind is a mechanistic explanation for an observation just because we cannot observe its direct action does not have a scientific precedent. I therefor think this objection is arbitrary and simply trying to make the hypothesis go away.
Also, having a mind as a mechanistic explanation is very useful for science as it provides a strong counter argument to help with rigor for evaluating a hypothesis. I think exploring the possibility of a multiple origin hypothesis is an exciting project for evolutionary biology and would make positive use of all the gene data that is currently being generated.
Without this we are simply repeating the assertion of the LUCA hypothesis without rigorous empirical support beyond comparing it to separate origins without design (random change plus cellular mechanisms) and asserting that a partial nested hierarchy is only explained by the LUCA hypothesis.
Imagine I claimed massless gravity, and you asked me for an example of gravity without mass, and I said ‘well, we don’t fully understand gravity, but we can create a predictive model of how it works, so there could be massless gravity!’
That’s the analogous conversation, and it’s patently absurd.
We absolutely do not know this for minds absent a physical substrate.
Neither you, nor anyone else, has ever presented a single example from the entire history of the universe wherein a mind absent a physical substrate did anything.
So you can’t say it is capable of generating complex concepts ‘on its own’, as you have exactly zero evidence for this claim.
If an entity A is known exclusively in the context of medium B, then you can’t propose A as an explanation for C in the absence of B without demonstrating the possibility of A existing absent of B first.
That isn’t the way science works.
I’ve seen no evidence you are qualified to assess the utility or merit of anything in the context of biology specifically or science generally.
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I don’t see how that supports your claim.
It cannot do any of those things without a body.
Not without a body.
Your hypothesis doesn’t have a scientific precedent either, so you don’t have a point.
Let us know when you find some minds that function without bodies.
It’s already been tested and rejected. The massive amounts of sequence data currently being generated support common descent. That’s why none of the people generating those data are promoting ID.
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Hi WD
I think your objections are well articulated but suffer from not looking at the problem realistically.
-Evolutionary theory especially the LUCA hypothesis is very deficient. You cannot explain mechanistically the major transitions taking into account what we are observing in the cell.
-If for arguments sake we are in a created universe the starting point being fully formed animals is realistic
-Using random change and cellular processes does not adequately test separate ancestry. Separate ancestry is about a different starting point for science.
The LUCA hypothesis is a science stopper as the field is no longer considering separate ancestry. The large amount of new sequence data coming out has a good chance of being misanalyzed because science may be using the wrong paradigm.
Imagine I claimed I can create lots of functional information generating quadrillions of purposefully arranged parts without a mind being involved 
This is true in the case of observing a biological world filled with purposely arranged parts generated by functional information.
Big, fat, juicy, scrumptious lie.
One question, if all of extant life had separate starting points, then tell me why they all fit into a generally consistent nested hierarchy, an important prediction of universal common descent?
List these “major transitions”?
That idea conflicts strongly with all available datasets be they from fossils, morphology and molecules.
This is bonkers. A separate origins hypothesis literally predicts no coalescence of the major animal groups the further one goes back in time and we see exactly the opposite everywhere we look.
This is like saying a globe earth is a science stopper as astrophysics is no longer considering a flat earth. Please Bill if you are empty on meaningful responses, stay mum.
Says someone with completely no clue on how science works. At this point you are now a complete joke to me. I won’t take you seriously anymore. Its pointless putting in effort to trying to get you to learn new stuff.
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Just going to leave this alone…
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Why could this not be the result of a design strategy optimizing component usage as we see in human designs. You are force fitting the evidence into the box you want it to fit into.
Are you claiming the LUCA hypothesis is compatible with multiple origins?
Because this isn’t component usage. The components themselves are organized into a nested hierarchy. Not only does the presence or absence of genes fit a hierarchy, the sequence of each gene also fits into that hierarchy. The components aren’t being re-used. They’re being modified in a consistent way for each different species. And even more, the way they’re being modified matches the sorts of things we see happening in mutations.
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I am not sure what this means. Do you have an example? This sounds like a design change but I realize that is not the point you are trying to make.
I’m referring to the fact that orthologous sequences in different species form a nested hierarchy. For examples, see literally any phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequence data. This is not by any stretch of the imagination “re-use of components”, because the components are not the same, differing among species in exactly the way predicted by common descent.
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