But doesn’t that work both ways.
ID proponents need to stop claiming that ID is science. They should present it as philosophy, not as science.
Why do we have to stop asking for experimental support when ID supporters claim that ID is scientific? Asking for experimental support seems like the very thing we should be doing in this situation. If their claims are untestable, then they aren’t scientific. At best, they are in the early stages of formulating a hypothesis.
A better way to put it is that ID supporters need to understand how scientific investigation works. We use the evidence we do have to test our hypotheses and theories. I have yet to see an ID supporter address this evidence in a way that disproves the theory of evolution or supports ID.
Those tests would look at the pattern of mutations that do occur, and compare those patterns with the patterns of genetic differences seen between lineages of fruit flies.
You write: “But doesn’t that work both ways. ID proponents need to stop claiming that ID is science. They should present it as philosophy, not as science.”
I concur completely! My “weak tea” way of describing your position was this sentence or two with an unavoidable implication: if ID shouldn’t criticize Evolutionists… on scientific grounds, then they can’t champion their own work on the same grounds either:
"Conversely, ID people have to stop criticizing Evolutionists about refusing to accept failure if they run various tests over the course of years and fail to replicate the natural emergence of this or that “Irreducible Complexity” - - the mysteries of the Universe and of existence are virtually infinite.
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You complain: “Why do we have to stop asking for experimental support when ID supporters claim that ID is scientific?”
My mother used to say, you can’t get heat out of a stove unless you put wood in it first!
If we tell the ID “squad” that you no longer expect them to be able to produce conclusions about God, because there’s no way to design an experiment for that … what would the squad say?
And when they counter regarding how many years Evolutionists expect to run their simulations … all we can say is: “until we know everything there is to know about the natural world”!
But you keep using the same flawed examples even after having this pointed out to you. ex: You can live in a cave, or a shack, no plan required. Building also do not reproduce themselves.
@T_aquaticus is correct; A designer capable of creating very complex things must also be capable of very simple things. There is no way in which this sort of design could ever be falsified.
Evolution is a pretty good example. 
Count me in here too. “Oh wow, that’s cool!” is not a reliable method of detecting design.
Suggestion: show that there are types of biological function where life could be possible, but are not reachable by means of natural evolution. we can do part of this already through genetic engineering. What is missing is the rigorous proof of non-evolvability.
I know several ID advocate who would reject this, claiming that ID is completely scientific and does not invoke God.
Good point! I sort of wish I had read this one first!
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In the pool shot model… everything is designed…
But Behe contemplates which operation cannot be accomplished by nature alone: these are the categories of irreducible complexities. Joshua has organized them into 2 or 3 levels.
@ T_aquaticus: asked “How does Behe determine if an observed mutation
was random or designed?”
To which, @Eddie answered: "This shows a continuing
misunderstanding of what ID is claiming… " And I think he’s right
about this. Which is why I am re-posting on the specific point
following! @Eddie continues with (in part): “One needs the whole
pattern before one can make a design inference.”
This might be true in some cases, but I want to point out that in the
case of the “Pool Shot Model” (whether Behe prefers this model or
not), the whole shot is designed. So even the non-amazing mutations
or evolutionary patterns in such a model are just as designed as
anything else.
The better way to ask the question raised by @T_Aquaticus is this:
“Which of the designed events are events that are least likely to have
happened without a designed chain of causation?”
This is where @Swamidass’ three levels of “Irreducible Complexity”
become relevant. Sometimes the question is not whether natural
causation can create the same thing on its own, but more: can God’s
plan wait for probabilities to eventually produce the desired
operation or process? I would think sometimes God just wants to
“take care of business… like a Boss… like God”.
I’ve always wondered just what observations like this are intended to demonstrate. 
It works for me! Any thoughts on what would be needed in order to have a reliable method of detecting design?
Do you mean that a designer capable of designing a complex design must also be capable of designing a simple design?
It’s not clear what "sort of design’ you are talking about.
I hope you are aware that ID does not purport to tell you what is or is not designed. There is no “not designed” detector and just because design cannot be detected in a given case it does not follow that it does not exist for that case.
So now ID doesn’t say biological life was Designed? When did they walk back that claim?
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Sorry. What i meant to convey was that ID doesn’t divide things into the two categories “designed” and “not designed.”
That’s convenient. ID can tell when things are Designed but it can’t / won’t tell us when things aren’t Designed. Makes for a pretty useless idea.
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Did you see my post which points out that the Pool Shot Model necessitates that all of the unfolding universe has been designed.
The more difficult items are merely categorized differently: “irreducibly complex”… but all part of the causal chain.
No, it wasn’t wrong. It was perfectly grammatically correct, but it was ambiguous. I try hard to make sure my words can have only one possible meaning, but even the best writers in the world occasionalIy produce ambiguous sentences, unwittingly.
When that happens, the usual strategy of good readers is to use context – the rest of the piece, the rest of the conversation, or what they know about the writer’s thought overall – to sort out which meaning is intended. I’ve given you three years of context on the question of miracles vs. front-loading. I’ve spoken frequently about the difference between the architect who designs and the builders who execute, between a supernatural designer who plans and natural causes which execute the plans. When you thought you had detected a “contradiction” in my expression, you could have used that context to dissolve the apparent contradiction, instead of trying to show I’d made an “error”. Good readers meet their authors half-way.
And that’s exactly the problem. There is little point in offering the most lucid, stepwise explanation to you, if you aren’t going to listen. I’ll remember that, next time the though crosses my mind, “If I can just find the right, orderly means of exposition, I can make George understand this point.” I’ll remind myself, “George probably won’t read beyond the third sentence anyway, so don’t bother.”
You aren’t listening. Above, I explained:
Stop being pedantic. Bacteria, or something very much like bacteria, certainly a one-celled creature that lived a billion or more years ago. That has been the standard belief of evolutionists for over 100 years now. If you don’t know that, you have no business speaking in public about evolution at all. And if you do know that, you are just being captious, which is immature, unworthy behavior of someone with a Ph.D.
I haven’t asked you to change your mind. I know that your mind is made up. You can’t admit design into nature without your whole world-view crumbling. I don’t write here for you, or for Dawkins, or for Krauss, or for Shermer, or for any of their disciples. I write here for the open-minded, who have not yet made up their minds about whether there is design in nature, and whether there is evidence for such design.
I’ve been trying to explain to you what Behe means, not to persuade you that Behe is correct. If you want to reject Behe’s conclusions, go ahead. But make sure you understand his thought before you reject it. I would say you don’t really understand it, if you think that Behe claims that a particular mutation X was a miraculous intervention. Behe’s claim is that the whole sequence of mutation/selection events that takes one from a bacterium without even a trace of a flagellum, to a bacterium with a functioning flagellum, could not have happened without design. That’s parallel to claiming that “John loves Mary” can’t appear in the sand on a beach without design. But chance and natural forces might easily carve a “J” or an “M” on the beach without design. “Detecting design” doesn’t mean “establishing that certain specific miraculous mutations occurred at certain times and places.” Unless you “get” this, you will never understand Behe, or the ID project overall.
It’s a response to any version of the “Tornado in a Junkyard assembling a 747” argument. We don’t infer design when seeing a 747; we already know it is designed, not evolved. Biological system are fundamentally different from 747’s, and the Tornado argument poses a straw man.
BUT, if we extent the 747 examples to all airplanes, and include humans in the ecosystem of airplanes, we see a sort of “evolution of airplanes” from the Wright Flyer up to 747’s, with lots of trial and error designs along the way.
Eddie’s example substitutes buildings in place of 747’s, without considering how the design of building has evolved.
Tags, like the manufacturer tags in our clothing. They are only readable by another intelligence, and they serve no purpose to the function of clothing. They might include instruction for proper care.
Measurable information in the genome that does not include the hallmarks of randomness. There is a paper by Theodoros [sp] that conducts just such a test of hypotheses using phylogenetic data. I won’t go into that here, except to note there is nothing controversial about the statistical methods applied. If Theodoros had concluded his test favored this design hypotheses, I would have to seriously consider that as a point of evidence in favor of ID. The test rejected ID, but the methodology is sound. ID researchers ought to be going crazy with this method, seeking evidence the scientific world would have to take seriously. That hasn’t happened.
Unreachable function - which is still undefinable because we don’t have a way of determining function until we see it in action. This is not irreducible complexity; I am suggesting the existence of different type of life (or at least some of it’s functions) from what we see on Earth, and a method of showing this function cannot arise from natural evolution processes. IF we had the tools to make that determination reliably, THEN we could apply it to ourselves.
Yes. I kind of mangled that, didn’t I? …
That sort of combined incredulity Eddie mentioned.
Tim already jumped on you about the other bit, so I’ll let that pass.
@Eddie, i didnt say your sentence had poor grammar. I said it was wrong… (it was wrong because it allowed for more than one interpretation, and valid statements on metaphysics are not permitted to do that).
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That’s because I don’t agree that the examples are flawed. A shack was still built by someone, according to a plan, however crude a plan. (And the fact that one can live in a cave is irrelevant; I had not claimed that caves were designed, but only that houses were designed.) No one here can prove that Stonehenge of the Great Pyramid could have been produced without design. (And no one here believes it, either!) No one here can prove (or believes) that a word-processing program sprang into existence due to to random changes in a spreadsheet program that happened to be useful for secretaries and writers and thus came to be adopted (“technological selection” so to speak). So my examples are quite sound; or if they aren’t, no one here has come anywhere near to showing why they aren’t.
Yes, I’m aware that buildings don’t reproduce themselves. So is Behe. And I agree that this is an important difference between man-made machines and organisms. I agree that the analogy with machines needs further argument before the application to organisms can be considered sound. But that is exactly what Behe has attempted to provide. His claim is that even though organisms can reproduce themselves, and unlike artificial machines exhibit variation, selection, etc., there are limits to what variation and selection in organisms can accomplish if they are unaccompanied by any planning or design. That is where Behe and T. aquaticus disagree. T. aquaticus thinks there are no limits at all, that variation, mutation, selection, etc. can produce an infinite number of irreducibly complex structures and systems, structures and systems far more complex than anything the best human engineers have ever made, without any planning or design at all.
I’m not here to prove which position is the correct one. I’m merely trying to establish what Behe says. T. aquaticus is maintaining that Behe absolutely demands miraculous interventions. I’ve tried to show that Behe never explicitly does so, and that at best it might be an implication of his thought. After many days of pointless debate, T. aquaticus grudgingly conceded that Behe didn’t ever directly claim that miraculous interventions were necessary. I thought that would end the discussion.
But now T. aquaticus wants to continue it, with a new focus. Now he wants to know which mutations Behe thinks were miraculously guided. But first, I don’t grant that Behe insists that any mutation was miraculously guided, and even if Behe does believe that some mutations were miraculously guided (which he might well believe), his argument for design doesn’t rest on pinpointing particular mutations, but on the overall trajectory of an evolutionary path.
If T. aquaticus is willing to specify a hypothetical but very precise set of mutations that could turn a bacterium without even a trace of a flagellum into a bacterium with a functioning flagellum (i.e., which nitrogenous bases would be added, subtracted, or substituted, by duplication, deletion, rotation or any other means), and in what chronological order the mutations would occur, I promise I will pass that detailed mutational account along to Behe and ask him personally if he thinks any of those changes required a miracle, and if so, which specific changes required miracles and which didn’t. But at the moment, we are arguing in a speculative vacuum; no proposal for constructing a flagellum by a specific set of mutations is on the table. I don’t think it’s profitable to engage in general speculation.
Yes, I agree, but I don’t see how this comes into the discussion.
I don’t know what “this sort of design” is.
Yes, it could be, if we are talking about Denton, or maybe Conway Morris. But not if we are talking about Darwin, Gaylord Simpson, Dobzhansky, Mayr, Gould, Dawkins, Coyne, Shermer, Ruse, Dennett …
Why is the onus on Darwin skeptics to prove non-evolvability? Why isn’t the onus on Darwinians to prove evolvability? Have you read any of the attempts by Darwinians to prove the evolvability of the camera eye? The speculations of Darwin and Dawkins on this are laughable scientifically – imprecise, vague, sketchy, totally qualitative and utterly non-quantitative – more poetic imagination than anything resembling real science. To my mind, the onus is on the “undirected evolutionists” to prove that the camera eye could have evolved without design; there is no onus the other way. If something is antecedently improbable, the onus is always on the person who asserts the antecedently improbable thing, not on the person who doubts it.
My main criticism of Behe and some other ID proponents is that they put themselves under an unnecessary burden by trying to prove that antecedently improbable transformations are impossible. It’s very rarely possible to prove a negative in speculative arenas. They thus put too high a burden of proof on themselves. The onus should not be on ID proponents to prove that the bacterial flagellum could not possibly have evolved by unguided processes; all they should have to show is that this seems wildly improbable. The onus should be on evolutionary biologists to provide detailed, stepwise pathways by which such a transformation could have occurred. But instead, they give us the same old generalities about the creative power of mutations and natural selection. Where’s the meat? Where’s the detailed account? Who here, or anywhere, can show us how a flagellum might have come into existence, by a series of environmentally selectable steps, with proper biochemical detail? I see handwaving generalities about co-option and exaptation and so on, but I don’t see anything like the detailed, stepwise account I would get if I asked an engineer how to build a dam and generating station on a particular river, capable of generating enough electricity to power a city of 50,000 inhabitants. The engineer would tell me exactly how it could be done, with hard numbers. By comparison, evolutionary biologists who speculate about the origin of the biological flagellum are scientific incompetents.
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No, that is not what the word “wrong” means. I can tell that your major was neither English nor Philosophy. (And since you’ve privately told me what your major was, my inference is sustained.) Maybe you should bone up in those areas before you accuse people of error.
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Classic deflection…