[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent post #81, betty boop!

Rather than the experimental approach to accreting "proof" incrementally, it may be more fruitful to take the Aristotelian approach, and simply assume a Prime Mover or First Cause of everything that is, and then see if there's anything we come across that disconfirms or refutes our universal premise.

That would make sense to me, too; however as you say But this would be the very approach that is most strenuously avoided these days as thoroughly "unscientific."

On the very long thread I offered a hypothesis with methods of falsification, as follows:

Hypothesis: Algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design.

Falsifications: That such algorithms or information content do not exist - or that such algorithms or information content can arise from null.

I used the broad definition of algorithm from Penrose’s Emporer’s New Mind to include such things as process, symbolization, conditional, recursives. The inception point for biological systems would be abiogenesis and for the physical realm, the big bang (including multi-verse and ekpyrotic models.)

After about 3000 posts on the big thread (and a lot of research since) - I remain convinced it is a good layperson's scientific hypothesis to determine intelligent design.

[unspun]

Thanks for this mind gem, AG.