Francis Bacon couldn't have done squat. For example, he had no electricity -- not to mention no idea even what electricity is. As such, there's no way he'd have been able to see the computer do much more than sit there. He'd have found himself staring at an odd set of objects, perhaps connected together by the odd flexible doohickeys. He'd have noted that they were covered by strange materials the likes of which he had never seen. He had no way of knowing that pushing the buttons with oddly-placed letters caused things to happen on the softish flat, dark-colored thing, and so on.... He may very well have dismissed it as some sort of odd religious artifact. It would have been highly unlikely indeed that he'd have been able to discern that this hunk of stuff would do math, help him write, and give him light to read by at night.
This is conjecture.
It is. OTOH, we know that it's probably a good conjecture, based on the past history of technology, not to mention the underlying science. I will admit, however, that we're familiar enough with technology now, to perhaps be less surprised by what will be invented in the future.
More than that, it may be provably wrong. Mathematics, for example, has explored not just the algebra we use in high-school, but the set of all possible algebras. It has looked at the behaviors on N-dimensional spaces, not just the 3 or 4 dimensional spaces we live in.
Given that algebraicists are still hard at work, I'd say that there's still plenty of algebra left to be invented. Certainly the depths of algebra have not been fully plumbed, and that is obviously even more true for mathematics in general. I don't see what that has to do with a discussion of evidence for design, however.
Moreover, I don't buy the idea that we can't distinguish with a high degree of certainty between a bug and a feature without the source code or a knowledge of the mental processes of the programmer.
I'm not so confident as you are. I've seen plenty of examples where an apparent "bug" turned out to be a central feature of a software design I did not understand (especially when the documentation is poor, or non-existent). I find that I make the mistake more often as the software I'm looking at becomes more complex. And it's even more difficult to change the software without causing some other, unexpected behavior. Why? Because the subtleties of the design are lost on me.
Then if you're not going to let poor old Francis plug in the computer, it's not a good analogy, because we can read the genetic code, and we do know how it translates into proteins. We may not have all the finer details of interference, suppression, promotion, etc., down yet, but we have a complete chemical structure, and most of the important details of how it operates.
Given that algebraicists are still hard at work, I'd say that there's still plenty of algebra left to be invented. Certainly the depths of algebra have not been fully plumbed, and that is obviously even more true for mathematics in general. I don't see what that has to do with a discussion of evidence for design, however.
You're asserting there may be stuff in there we don't understand. I agree. But the set of things we don't understand about the genetic code is circumscribed by mathematical restrictions on what could be in there. Yes, algebraicists are hard at work, but, for example, we have a complete catalog of all groups, and we can prove it is complete.
On a more mundane level; we have at least fifty genomes sequenced, and we know that genes within those genomes were not chosen from some menu of possible building blocks according to function, as one would expect if they were designed, but are related by small integer numbers of changes to functionally equivalent or functionally similar genes in organisms which for independent reasons were thought to be close evolutionary relatives. In other words, the pattern of changes between the molecular structure of the genomes of organisms closely agrees with what was predicted from evolutionary theory, before we had significant amounts of genetic information available. Among the thousands of genes in higher organisms, I know of no single example of a gene that confounds evolutionary predictions - that is clearly, in a statistically significant way, closer in sequence to an evolutionarily more distant organism than it is to a closer organism. Of the tens of thousand of genes in whales, all without exception are closer in structure to the genes of hoofed mammals than to the genes of fish. So your putative designer never, ever, not once chose a fish gene to fulfill a function in an animal in an ecologically similar niche, preferring to adapt a land animal gene instead.
It makes no sense. And I'm sorry, I think we have more than enough information to say that that's not how an intelligent being would go about designing the biosphere.
And it's even more difficult to change the software without causing some other, unexpected behavior. Why? Because the subtleties of the design are lost on me.
Or, more often, it's just crappy design in the first place.
I sense we've hit an impasse here. By all means follow up, but I'm not sure I will. And thank you for a civil and stimulating discussion, something that's rare on a crevo thread.