Just to add to your excellent points, a couple more points. We have no other concrete examples of a design from which attributes of the designer cannot be inferred. The best example of designs from we infer attributes of the designer are early Renaissance paintings, which are often anonymous, but whose characteristics similarity of style, brush strokes, composition, etc., generally allow them to be assigned to ,e.g., 'the Pisan master'. Most of the time we don't have to do this, but if one thinks, for example, of the oeuvre of Picasso, we can certainly conclude even if we knew nothing of him, that we could learn a great deal about the man simply from his work. So why can't we say something about the designer from ID?
I think I understand Betty boop's relucance to do this. If one focusses only on the positive aspects of putative design - the complexity and interconnectedness of some biological organelles for example - one can happily contemplate the benignity and the intelligence of the creator. However, if one looks at the whole picture - to take just one example, genomic elements which seem to exist only to propagate themselves, occasionally causing horrible congenital ailments as a mere byproduct - one is forced to adopt a much more morally equivocal picture. A Manichaen son god. powerful and creative but possessing also vices, would fit the bill, but not the incorruptable, omniscient divine being of Christianiaty post 400 AD.
Obviously, I don't believe in ID, anyway; I'm just taking their argument to its conclusion. But this strikes me as being a result of a fundamental logical problem with Christian theology -they have papered over the problem of evil. Even without science, there has been no credible explanation of why a good creator would allow the magnitude of suffering and ignorance and malignity that has always infested the earth. You don't need to torture billions just to test free will; a good reducing diet will do that. Well, there is evil lurking in the human genome; and unless you let the Devil have a hand in its design, you've got problems.
So there it is; even if you abandon naturalism, science is necessarily logical. Christianity has never been able to square itself with fundamental logic; it has always relied on the ineffability of the Creator. The abandonment of naturalism required by ID isn't in tiself sufficient to reconcile science with religion; one is forced to also abandon reason. And stripped of naturalism and reason, how can what is left be called science?
Indeed. And if we approach the problem from the other end, I would suggest that it's not at all clear that we can infer design without first knowing something about the putative designer. The only things that we really know are designed are those things that are the product of conscious human activity. In fact, we're intuitively familiar with human activities, such that very few people have any trouble at all sorting even unfamiliar objects into "natural" and "man-made" categories. But the reason we're able to do that is because we infer man-made status based on what we already know about other man-made objects and what we already know about the sorts of things humans do.
But we don't know what putative life-designers are like - certainly not in the same way that we know about human manufactures and human activities. In fact, we are told that we musn't speculate about such life-designers, because such speculation is inherently non-scientific. And I think people tend to fall into a sort of false analogy - because we can usually readily spot human-designed objects, the belief is that we can readily spot non-human designed objects. But that completely ignores the fact that we have information in the first case that we don't have in the second case, and it's that information that lets us do what we do in the first case. We aren't able to sort things into man-made versus natural objects because we have some inherent facility for doing so - sorting objects like that is a learned behavior, perfected by gathering information about things known to be designed, and about the sorts of things that designers are known to do.
And this is information that we don't have in the case of living things. We don't have any living things that are known to be non-human-designed, for comparative purposes, nor do we really know anything about the designer, such that we can spot the hallmarks of his/her/its/their handiwork. Which, to conclude and summarize, leads us to the base problem in spotting "intelligently designed" structures - in claiming that we can spot evidence of non-human design, we are behaving as though we have information that we do not, in fact, actually have, and thereby unconsciously misapplying a process that, in order to be useful, requires the information that we don't have.
So there it is; even if you abandon naturalism, science is necessarily logical. Christianity has never been able to square itself with fundamental logic; it has always relied on the ineffability of the Creator.
I just hate it when people attribute motives to other people, for the seemingly sole purpose of impugning arguments they disagree with, Professor. You insist ID is about smuggling the Creator in through the back door. Professor, you are entitled to your opinion in this. I do not share it.
One may infer the "attributes of the designer" if one wishes to do so. But it seem to me this enterprise would be extra-scientific on its face. That question goes to ontological, not empirical questions.
You raised the issue of theodicy -- why an infinitely good and powerful God would permit evil in the world -- which you allege Christian theology "papers over." Actually, Christianity delves into this issue with great psychological and ontological sensitivity and penetration. But at the end of the day, what can finally be said about the problem of evil in the world is that it is the mysterium iniquitatis -- the "mystery of iniquity," a mystery right up there with why God created the universe in the first place. The question is unanswerable for us humans, because there is no specific, hard evidence occurring in the space-time world in which we live that sheds such light on the problem that we can say with any kind of certainty that God's motives can be elucidated. The motive may operate in the world; but it only appears here as motif. We are free to speculate about it; but certainty is out of the question. Or so it seems to me.
Speaking of speculating about the problem of evil, here's Lance Morrow's fascinating take (from Evil: An Investigation, 2003):
"Evil has much to teach us. My answer to the dilemma of theodicy -- the mystery of why a good God permits evil in the world -- is that evil is our greatest and perhaps our only effective instructor. With so much instruction available in the form of evil, we should all be geniuses. Evil, in some strange way, is what keeps us in motion toward the unseen destination. Evil supplies us with the horrible incompleteness that we need. If we were perfected, then we would be motionless at last, and so would God. Is it blasphemous to say that evil is in some sense the primum mobile?...
"But if we view evil at a reasonable distance, it is possible to think of it as part of a larger ecology.... Although those suffering the viciousness of their fellow men can be only remotely comforted by the thought...evil is ultimately indispensable and creative, a part of the world's energy. It is one necessary half of a cosmic exchange. Good and evil are matter and antimatter. Even the unthinkable eventually recedes into the soil and fertilizes new history.
"This fairly simple and sane view has a distinguished pedigree in some Eastern religions. In the West, clarity about evil has tended to be obscured in doctrinal complexities, in forests of dense theological nicety and ecclesiastical politics; efforts at symmetry [e.g., of good and evil] have tended to be suppressed as heretical (Manichaeism, Gnosoticism, Albigensianism, and so on).
"Time is meaningless without the punctuation of events. Evil is the great agitator of events. Evil makes things happen; so does good, which makes its living -- defines itself and perfects itself -- by responding to evil....
"Time has no meaning except in stories. Stories measure time. In the beginning was the Word; the purpose of the Word is to record the stories and seek their meaning.
"Without evil, there is no time.
"Without violation, there is no trust. Without trust, there can be no violation.
"Without evil, there is no symmetrical definition of the good. In fact, there is no good. Without valleys, no mountains, and vice versa. All moral meaning -- although we may be disconcerted to think it -- depends upon the existence of evil.
"It is not the direct action of transformation -- as of catepillar into butterly -- that gives evil its meaning. It is rather a much broader chemical response, the dia;ectic of good and evgil in the human heart, that is important. It is not so much that evil is transformed directly into good, as that evil acts as foil and antagonist in the theater of the world, and without evil, you have no drama, that is to say, no life perhaps worth living...."
Morrow quotes South African author Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela on this point: "...the line separating good from evil is paper-thin."
What got evil started in the Universe, according to Christian account, was Lucifer's exercise of free will: "Non serviam." Lucifer -- an Archangel of the highest rank (i.e., on a par with Michael and Gabriel) was most beloved of God, as the lgend goes. God called him "prince of light," and "son of the Morning Star." But apparently, God and Luficer quarrelled (about God's plan to create the Universe, or of man???); and the upshot was Lucifer -- Satan -- told God to go stuff it, and irrevocably separated himself from God. He and certain personal, loyal minions chose to leave Heaven, forever to live outside of God's life, law, grace, and light -- and thus became the Absolute Negative, anti-Life, Evil. And his personal ugliness increased and flourished, for he chose to cut himself off from the Source of all beauty and truth -- which is God.
Anyhoot, Evil would appear to have the quality of an intelligent, willing entity that cycles in and out of human affairs. It has its own purposes, and it works its purposes constantly via the means of human souls, Satan's tools and alleged "future repast." One of its purposes is everlastingly to slander, to revile, to accuse Man before God; to tempt men away from God, thus to destroy as many souls as possible. Satan knows that the end of the day he cannot win; his fate is sealed. He just wants to take as many humans down into perdition with him as possible.
Or that is what the legend says. Anyhoot, Satan wants to be our "role model" -- to do as he did, and say to God, "non serviam" -- "I will not serve You."