I just wanted to mention that at post 324 I offered some testable claims for intelligent design and creation in response to a related challenge from Doctor Stochastic.
Okay, thanks. Checked it out. "Steganalysis," "Steganography," etc. will require some further investigation on my part.
This seems to be something that needs to be spelled out in laymen's terms. First step, in my opinion, is at least agreeing there are "designed things" present in the universe.
Am I wrong in assuming there are only two possibilities? 1.) designed things exist, or 2.) designed things do not exist? Perhaps a third: All of existence is a figment of my imagination, but I don't think those kind of skeptics inhabit this place.
If you'll permit, me, I'd like to take a brief pass at this.
I'll beg off on the evidence of God's shout producing the cosmic background radiation variation, which, while charmingly clever, doesn't seem altogether pursuasive to me.
What I did want to talk about was the proposal that we look for an instruction manual in the junk DNA. Or, for example, a decoded message saying "I, God, did this!".
I'd put all such proposed evidence from left field, as it were in the just-so-story bin. When IDers are challenged to come up with an experiment, what we mean is a critical experiment--one that might say yea or nay to a thesis on the table, and expanded to sufficient detail to make such an experiment constructable. As you know, this the Popperian commitment to falsifiability in science.
If you should unambiguously decrypt such a message, or if God appears in the midst of a burning bush on MTV and takes full credit, then we'll be on a new footing with ID. But until then, proposed evidence not presently on the table is outside the technical competence of science.
Otherwise, this notion remains on the sideline right alongside the argument for design. It has the potential to be science, since nobody can demonstrate that it couldn't be true, but without some form of compelling evidence to hand, science it is not.