OK, Eric. Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you that if we can’t agree on this basic argument, the implementations are pointless. The problem is, as I mentioned above, I don’t see how different your argument is from arguments for God from fine-tuning of constants, or from the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. In fact, in other threads I have been advancing similar arguments. One crucial difference here is that I don’t think this is something that has anything to do with methodological naturalism - I think this is a question that is answered with philosophical and theological arguments.
But even if this turns out to be right, it will not affect the way we do science. The evidence for this is that I myself (and many other Christian scientists) believe that God has designed the universe, and God continuously sustains the order He has created, yet we hold to MN. Thus to me, information theory arguments are really red herrings because they only obscure the basic philosophical argument that you are advancing. As I said, it’s just window dressing.
OK, but information non-growth in the way you described here is not going to be able to rule out the hypotheses of ID vs. non-ID. At most, it can differentiate between “more ID” and “less ID”, assuming you’ve already committed to the basic thesis that all order is evidence of ID. We’ve just seen this demonstrated in this thread, where even if Josh demonstrates that MI can arise out of natural processes, you can simply reply that those natural processes are the result of ID anyway. Therefore, the disagreement is still fundamentally philosophical. This is why Josh keeps complaining that the debate is “circular.” Because it is: the science assumes a certain philosophy of nature. The debate about ID (at least your version of it) isn’t a scientific one, it’s a philosophical one, or perhaps even just rhetorical one.