Later you debunk ID insofar as it presents an "immaterial cause." May I ask how your suggestion qualifies as a "material cause?"
Later you debunk ID insofar as it presents an "immaterial cause."
I do not debunk ID, I am a proponent of ID. I merely recognize that the flavor of ID arising from immaterial causes is a peak unassailable by science, due to fundamental epistimological constraints on the power of reasoning from evidence. Namely, the need for evidence that can be disambiguated by further observation.
May I ask how your suggestion qualifies as a "material cause?"
All theses that attempt to explain the world by examining material, or relationships between material with an investigatable causal connection are, by philosophical definition, material. To students of philosophy, material only means excluding immaterial explanations, it is not confined to tangible, touchable physical entities.
In the modern world, trying to adhere to such a strict regimen regarding materiality would leave you gasping for intellecual air--you would have to exclude, for example such tools of inferencial observation as the oscilloscope, the electron scanning microscope, and the spectroscope.
Abstract theories about how the universe operates are built into our modern fundamental scientific instruments. No one has ever seen or felt a radio tuning crystal oscillate, we can only observe secondary effects, and infer the cause. Just as astronomers and physicists do in trying to peer back into the Big Bang.