Again, I jump into an ongoing conversation with an extraneous question. But I have to ask while you are posting and it's on my mind.
It seems to me that ID would immediately be accepted as mainstream science if it would address one of its underlying assumptions, that the outcome of cnange can be predicted.
It seems to me that when you say something is designed, you imply that the designer knows how something will work before it is actually built. So it would seem that the central mission of ID would be to find the underlying predictive model that allows one to creat new things with knowledge of how their structure will be expressed.
In the case of a living system (an ecology) you would also need a model that predicts the reproductive success of anything new. Otherwise, no matter how clever your design, natural selection would still be the shaper of things.
This has been in the back of my mind since I started reading these threads, but this is the first time I've seen the question clearly as something that could be researched.
Off hand, I see several approaches to the challenge based on the disciplines touched, e.g. biology, physics, math, cosmology. So I’m sure others will be interested in it. And I don't want to shut the door on any of my own thoughts, because your challenge entails considerable meditation, thought experiments, research, etc.
My first reaction, though, concerns the nature of space/time itself - whether the future is knowable anywhere within or outside space/time.
The later is an obvious yes, because our four dimensions (3 of space and 1 of time) is a hypercube. Thus any perspective which allows one to see the entire hypercube is, definitionally speaking, apart from it, i.e. outside of space/time. The future is as clear as the present or past to anyone outside the hypercube. God sees all. Past, present, future only has meaning inside the hypercube to those in corporeal perspective, moving along a worldline.
Not quite so obvious is that the perception of time and space is relative within the hypercube between two observers on different worldlines, that is called simultaneity. Even less obvious is that gravity, which if positive is an indentation of space/time and if negative is an outdent of space/time has the same effect as velocity with regard to worldlines. space/time wheel.
In sum, from within the hypercube, foreknowledge could be no more than an illusion with regard to another’s worldline. However, add only one temporal dimension to the hypercube and what we who dwell in the hypercube perceive as a timeline becomes a plane and then foreknowledge, past knowledge, non-locality/superluminal events are all possible. The existence of another temporal dimension is proposed but not (yet) evidenced. We cannot exclude the possibility.
The next question moves to whether a future event has ever been known – prophesied – with sufficient specificity to conclude that the future is known. To answer that, I would turn to ancient manuscripts and recorded history.
The prophesies of Psalms 22 for example are quite specific and were fulfilled in Christ’s crucifixion. Daniel’s prophesies concerning Alexander the Great were also quite specific and fulfilled and recorded much later by Josephus. And one which always make me chuckle: the scientists who had dated the book of Enoch (before it was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls) – used a date after Herod the Great because their presumption was that prophesy is impossible (scientific materialism). Carbon dating of the Enoch scroll at Qumran set the date of that particular copy at 200 B.C. The date of the original is unknown but of course must be older than that.
So, standing back and looking at the geometry of space/time and the evidence of fulfilled prophesy, my first response is that the Designer in Intelligent Design theory – if outside of space/time, i.e. God – would indeed have the foreknowledge to circumvent the forces of natural selection – indeed to circumvent everything in the hypercube. If the designer were inside the hypercube (e.g. cosmic ancestry) – then natural selection could only be averted by the existence of an additional temporal dimension available to the designer’s vision and mind. (Our human vision and mind are constrained to a selection of 4 coordinates).
If the Designer is God, outside the hypercube, then experimentation with the hypercube would not be necessary nor precluded. When a change is made to the design, or a deviation permitted within the hypercube - the results are already known over all of time to the Designer outside of space/time. This is how predestination and free will are not mutually exclusive. (For Christians lurking, this is also how Christ’s being enfleshed from outside the hypercube into the hypercube and His crucifixion from within the hypercube and release of the Spirit would reach to every where and every when.)
Anyway, those are my first blush reactions to your challenge, js1138. I will be meditating further on the subject though and probably posting again!
DI would have a better chance if it could even demonstrate a single falsifying prediction. ID proponents need to describe an experiment (actually several) that would allow ID to be distinguished from other proposals. So far, nothing has been proposed and ID is still only an attack on science rather than part of it.