This is one of the big problems with design theory of life. It has no
useful implications. That is, given that there is a designer, we still
don't know anything about the real world, because we don't know diddly about
the designer's plan (or even about his motives). Given only the premise
that there is a designer, we can't even conclude that he necessarily choose
to create life at all, if we did not know that he already had; it is not an
implication we can draw from the design theory premise.
That is, whether it is true or not, design theory as such is useless except
for propaganda, etc.
What needs to be done to make it useful? Well, it needs to be combined with
assumptions about what the designer is up to. For example, we can add the
further postulate that the designer chose to create all forms life at once,
as in Genesis. Or we can add the assumption that he creates new organisms
or types of organisms individually over a span of billions of years, etc.
In fact, it becomes possible to make a very testable theory by introducing
the equivalent of evolution into the theory. But only the added premises are
testable in these cases, which makes the designer premise itself
superfluous.
The non-evolutionist thus has a dilemma: He can keep this theory pure at the
expense of making it purely non-empirical, or he can make it an empirical
theory at the expense of making the theory more like the theory of evolution
and also at the expense of making the designer component of it ultimately
superfluous.
Any truly scientific theory will have to be very much like the theory of
evolution in that it will have to have pretty much the same "package" of
empirical implications. This is because way too many of evolution's
empirical implications are known to be true independently of the theory of
evolution. For example the wide variability of offspring of organisms was
known even in Biblical times (just wait: someone will start claiming
that the claims of such variability are merely part of evolutionist circular
argumentation). For another example, most of modern genetics is not based on
evolution, and yet it supports evolutionary theory very strongly. But it
does not lend support to the designer premise at all.
Since design theory does not have many useful empirical implications, if
any, it is not much of a theory. This is what people like Phillip Johnson
would like us not to know.
If you haven't already seen it, please check out my table comparing
evolution and designer theory at:
http://www.sfo.com/~ccogan/Comparing%20Evolution%20and%20Design%20Theory.htm
--Chris Cogan
Now is the time for all good people to come to.