I suggest you go looking for the beam in your own eye, bb. Let me quote you from 277, addressed to myself and general_re.
I gather you both regard ID as an “interloper” and a challenge to your own metaphysical doctrines, and that is the reason you refuse to even consider it.
and
Since you absolutely reject the existence of God, you are therefore spared the inconvenience of entertaining the arguments in support of the theory of a designed universe. You have come to this conclusion via a very circuitous and – might I suggest – unscientific route.
The accusation that I reject the existence of God is, BTW, downright false.
Moving along; you haven't said why inferring the attributes of the designed is extra-scientific, in a way that inferring the attributes of an anonymous painter would not be. Calliong it ontology isn't an answer. A scientific analysis of the painter of an anonymous work isn't ontology.
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
Thanks to 12 years of Catholic education, I'm well familiar with the relevant doctrine. It's an unfathomable mystery; since Christian philosophy managed to create some sort of rational edifice over most of the rest of Christian doctrine, I don't think it's going too far to say they papered over the problem of evil. For all the rather Gnostic and existential arguments about how evil is necessary to allow good, one is stuck with a fundamental contradiction. After all, if evil brings forth good, then the Holocaust must have been the greatest producer of good in human history. But that's nonsense. If we really believed that sickness were necessary to allow the virtue of stoicism, as a society we'd promote sickness. We don't. We strive to eliminate evil. No rational person does evil to increase the opportunity for good. To suggest that God permits evil to exist for that purpose requires that God be irrational.
So, while Chrisitianity can perfectly well claim that God moves in a mysterious way, at the same time to be beyond explanation is to be beyond logic, because logic requires cause and effect. Thus my point that positing an ineffable designer puts ID beyond logic as well as beyond naturalism.
Anyhoot, Satan wants to be our "role model" -- to do as he did, and say to God, "non serviam" -- "I will not serve You."
Conflating skepticism about Christian dogma with the incarnation of evil is one of the uglier aspects of Christian doctrine. No doubt we could be living in a universe where some of us will be eternally tortured for asking for a little hard evidence. Me, I'd prefer to think we are somewhere better than pre-liberation Iraq.
Inferring the attributes of a painter -- or a painting -- is not a scientific problem. The latter is a problem for aesthetics, art appreciation, etc. Is not science!
But I am not positing an ineffable designer -- at least not as a scientific problem. You are.