Besides, who designed CJYman!

grrrr …. and it was gonna be a good one.

Of course, a definition of "miracle" would definitely be needed. Is a miracle something which "breaks the laws of nature?" If this were the accepted defintion, then I'm wondering what would even be a relevant hypothetical example or a template of sorts?

Does flight "break" the natural law of gravity? Well, obviously not. It just relies on other natural laws to provide the appearance of a circumvension of a natural law.

Could we say that if someone just all of a sudden >poofHere's a little more of my brain juice re: information.

And, here's a question for anyone interested: "Since science is the study of natural laws which describe the repeatable results that occur upon specific initial conditions, what are the specific initial conditions that repeatedly produce information processing systems?"

2. No phenomenon has been shown to be the result of intervention by a supernatural entity. (And yes, I recognize that the designer need not be supernatural).

Erm… what do you mean by "shown?" Miracles happen every day, somewhere in the world to someone in the world. Prime example, I think, is spontaneous remission - when someone left for dying suddenly decides to get up and go home, no signs of their terminal disease in evidence. Sure, a lab crew would complain that it's "anomalous," by which they mean unrepeatable at will, but that sure doesn't explain it. They could ask around - there are literally hundreds of dedicated doctors all over the world who could cite these "anomalies" as real phenomena that indeed do happen.

Being "anomalies," the lab crew would probably say that while they have no idea what DID happen, they do know for a fact what DIDN'T happen - a real miracle. Of course, that's totally bogus, since they don't know what happened. If the individual whose late-stage terminal cancer disappeared completely overnight says "God healed me," who is qualified to say not so? The doctors who don't know? The lab rats that don't know? The internet insta-pundits who don't know?

Maybe a court of law could rule on the matter, as a 'finding of fact', on the testimony of medical and/or scientific "experts" pro and con. That ruling would be FAPP authoritative, n'est ce pas?

…and if so, the question was settled in 1999 when a ruling in District Court did indeed declare a certain unexplainable medical reality to be - in 'finding of fact' - a Miracle. On the sworn testimony of a dozen "experts" over two solid weeks, dealing with moving boxes full of physical evidence (including films).

So I'd have to say that your #2 is an erroneous assertion - legal precedent does exist and miracles do happen. Individuals may attribute it according to pre-existing beliefs, but that doesn't negate the fact that unexplainable things happen. There seems to be more to the totality of reality than just our little circumscribed corner of it.

We can't take our intuition of time and apply it to a billion years, just as we can't take our intuition of 50mph and apply it to half the speed of light.

We can, however, apply basic mathematics.

The old saw about monkeys at typewriters creating the works of Shakespeare is an example.

If every atom in the universe were a monkey banging on a typewriter, and each monkey had typed one character a second since the beginning of the universe, you wouldn't have even one page of Shakespeare written. . .

So any theory that attempts to use "billions of years" as some kind of magic talisman to produce any result, no matter how improbable, is utterly flawed.

This is a common talking point but in reality no phenomenon apart from origins (the universe and life) have suggested that possibility. The wind up let it work idea would make the intervention view unnecessary anyway.

2. No phenomenon has been shown to be the result of intervention by a supernatural entity. (And yes, I recognize that the designer need not be supernatural).

It is no coincidence either. None of the major religions advocate constant interference by a deity anyway.

3. Darwinian processes don't invoke unknown entities to explain away difficulties.

At point of origins there are no identifiable processes. There is instead much speculation.

ID does nothing, having reached a verdict already.

An ID perspective opens up engineering and information approaches not suggested by an historic narrative. This comment by S Cordova helps illustrate the point:

This symbolizes the fact that evolutionary biology (with the exception of the very admirable field of operational population genetics and fine evolutioanry biologists like Richard Sternberg) is becoming scientifically irrelevant to the emerging high-tech biotech industry.

Systems Biology (an ID-sympathetic engineering perspective) will be the dominant paradigm for describing biological systems. Evolutionary biology will find itself largely irrelevant to modern science and technology"¦..

The perspective of engineering and information science will infuse the biological disciplines of the future. This Systems perspective gives design priority over natural selection in interpreting biological systems.

What ID needs is a concept which does what IC and SC were intended to do: identify a property of systems which proves that they could not have evolved, or at least that the probability is small enough to be neglected.

An initial genome would fit this requirement. Minimal genome research supports the small probability concept.

First of all, "chance of the gaps" is prejudicial, since Darwinian processes, taken as a whole, are not random. That aside, the fact is that naturalistic explanations do not invoke some previous unknown, hugely complicated entity to fill the explanatory gap. ID does.

There is no identifiable Darwinian process until a cell exists. ID should go only so far as the natural evidence suggests. That does not encompass the supernatural depictions found in religious texts indicating huge complications.

So rather than saying

Unintelligent processes cannot produce IC / SC.

"¦wouldn't it be more honest to say

I don't see how an unintelligent process can produce IC/SC.

More like 'The thousands of scientists claiming that unintelligent processes can produce IC/SC have not shown that they can'.

1. Many phenomena that were previously thought to require a designer's intervention have been shown over the years to be explicable in terms of simpler physical laws.

I'd be interested to hear specifically which phenomena you're thinking of. In any case, it goes both ways; things which were once considered simple and straightforward turn out to be astonishingly complex. Until 1862 many people (including Aristotle, funnily enough) believed that organisms could simply arise from non-living matter.

2. No phenomenon has been shown to be the result of intervention by a supernatural entity. (And yes, I recognize that the designer need not be supernatural).

The words "natural" and "supernatural" are usually question-begging. If we discovered a supernatural entity, how would we know that it was supernatural? And it's not enough to say 'it broke the laws of nature'. When 'the laws of nature' were Newton's laws, the perihelion of Mercury's orbit was 'supernatural', if we so define 'supernatural'. When something breaks 'the laws of nature', we don't call it supernatural, we revise our conception of the laws.

3. Darwinian processes don't invoke unknown entities to explain away difficulties. ID invokes an unknown designer, vastly more complicated than the phenomenon being explained, solely for the purpose of explaining it. Occam's Razor suggests that this is not a good idea.

Intelligent agents exist. They can produce IC/SC systems. This is straightforward. Granted, the utter depths of the pre-biological past are opaque to us, but history, a fortiori prehistory is like that; I see no reason to believe their cannot be a non-human intelligence that predates life on earth.

As for evidence for such an intelligent agent - a chief evidence for the activities of prehistoric people are the artifacts they left behind. Essentially, ID is an argument that life on earth is such an artifact, evidence for an intelligent agent.

4. ID proponents have done nothing more than come up with a couple of concepts, IC and SC, which turn out not to be barriers to Darwinian evolution (for reasons explained in my previous comment).

Since they are not barriers, arguing that an IC system must have been designed is tantamount to saying "I don't see how it could have evolved," or "You haven't shown me a pathway by which it could have evolved."

This is an argument from ignorance "” a classic "gaps" argument.

What, "Nobody can show that X is possible" is no reason to believe that "X is not possible".

Right. Here's the deal. I am the intelligent designer. I'm not a person, but an immortal sentient cloud of gas. I got _seriously_ bored, so I created life on earth using my telekinesis. Took a while to get interesting, but it's a hoot right now.

Now, nobody has yet proven that my "BenK is a sentient cloud of Gas" hypothesis is false, so I figure it's at least on the level of other theories about the place.

Of course, this is nonsense. If nobody can show that RM/NS can produce SC/IC, I don't see any reason to believe that they can, especially when evidence that intelligent agents can produce SC/IC is so abundant.

5. ID doesn't really help science along. Suppose we conclude that some system is designed. The first thing scientists should do is to try to falsify this conclusion by showing that natural mechanisms are sufficient and more likely.

I'm not primarily interested in 'helping science along', I'm interested in knowing what's actually true. This argument sounds like we should adopt atelic explanations a priori and hold to them come what may.

… What ID needs is a concept which does what IC and SC were intended to do: identify a property of systems which proves that they could not have evolved, or at least that the probability is small enough to be neglected.

The burden of proof cannot be on one side to prove a negative. Such proof is impossible. By definition, it cannot be shown that some unknown unintelligent process can produce IC/SC.