Tom said:
"If the implication buried in ID is really that everything is designed,
then no matter what the data show, ID would work..."
I'm not sure that that's quite right. According to ID, there are some
things in the 'natural' realm which exhibit legitimate empirical
evidence of designedness. ID does not, as I understand it, necessarily
claim or imply that everything is designed, although it is consistent
with that.
But suppose that ID claimed that absolutely everything was designed. It
need not (and I think does not) claim that everything *exhibits*
empirical evidences recognizable by us as constituting legitimate
indications of designedness. There might well be things that indeed are
designed but which are unrecognizable or empirically unconfirmable as
such by us. That might mean that some of our criteria for design
indication are incomplete, but not that they are inadequate for the
cases they do address. Here's an analogy. We might be able easily and
correctly to recognize some things on Callisto as alien artifacts, and
have no clue as to the artifactuality of other things there, even were
it true that Callisto itself and everything on it was of alien
manufacture. That need cast no doubt upon our means of recognizing as
artifacts those things that we did so recognize. And even if it were
suggested that these aliens were so advanced that there was nothing on
Callisto (or Callisto itself) that they could not have produced - i.e.,
even if no one could specify Callistoan conditions of non-alien
origination - that would not show that there was anything defective or
suspicious in our having identified an abandoned alien spacesuit as
indeed of alien design and manufacture. Our criteria of alien
designedness might obviously be incomplete, but that is consistent with
all of the positive deliverances of those criteria being utterly
reliable. (And the existence of the aliens would still be confirmed.)
Similarly, even if everything in the cosmos is indeed designed, and we
cannot point to a single thing that we could say with confidence was not
designed, that generates no problems for the in principle legitimacy of
specific cases for the designedness of specific phenomena.
And in any case, one has to be a bit careful with what one makes of
claims of unfalsifiability. For one thing, such claims conceal a number
of philosophy of science minefields. (Just relax - I'm not going to
talk about that.) But there is one brief moral worth noting. One
should not be tempted to make the mistake of thinking that if something
cannot be disconfirmed that it cannot be confirmed either. Consider the
following perfectly respectable empirical theory about the physical
cosmos:
There are somewhere in the universe two identical 95 kilogram
chunks of space debris.
That perfectly respectably empirical theory cannot be falsified or (I
suspect) even disconfirmed in any very strong way. (The universe is a
pretty big place to establish negative results of that sort in.) Yet
it could be positively confirmed - by someone actually finding two such
chunks.
So suppose that some design theorist did think that everything was in
fact designed, and was unable to specify conditions of something being
undesignable by God. Exactly what is supposed to follow?
Del Ratzsch