I have repeatedly stated that I view the possibility of intelligent design (without any religious aspect) as being an interesting one that should be considered.
And I was siding with you and agreeing with you. Don't be so defensive that you start attacking your friends.
If an either-or-argument has been set up, then it is by good persons such as yourself who are anxious to attack the foolishness of ID (the kind filled with and inspired by religion).
I don't know how you can say that I'm one of those who set up an either-or-argument, when what I wrote was a warning against thinking that way. I wasn't criticizing you Hipparchia, those remarks were directed more at the likes of Dinosaur, Fraggle and their friends.
Arguments about 'evolution' shouldn't be imagined as if they are a dichotomy between absolute unquestioning fundy-style belief in 'the facts of evolution' (whatever they are) as suggested in the subject line and adherence to ID (whether capitalized or not) as the only other alternative. The possibility (however remote it might be) remains that future science might conclude that Darwin and Wallace were wrong about natural selection being the engine of speciation, without any suggestion that any intelligent designer exists. Maybe somebody will propose a different naturalistic explanation for what's observed that somehow succeeds better.
I'm not expecting that to happen, I'm just pointing out that it remains a possibility that can't be excluded by expressions of devout scientistic faith and by careful avoidance of any blasphemous expressions of 'anti-science' or 'denial'. (Again, the criticism implicit in those words is not directed at you.)
I personally think that natural selection is a very good and very plausible theory, and I would give it a high likelihood of being true. I'm very impressed by how well the flood of new information currently coming in from molecular genetics and genomics coheres with a theory that was advanced in the middle 19th century, when little was known about genetics. That's a wonderful example of consilience (when unrelated avenues of inquiry point to the same conclusions), and I'm inclined to take that as a strong indicator of truth.
I can readily see why that is an interesting topic, however I suspect that your interest revolves around the likes of the Discovery Institute and their promotion of ID.
I'm not as familiar as you seem to be with the Discovery Institute. I've never mentioned them.
Have you considered the impact of that view of intelligent design impacts on the ability of scientists to consider, dispassionately, lower case intelligent design.
What is "lower case intelligent design"? From earlier remarks, I take it that it's ID that isn't joined at the hip with Biblical creationism (and by extension, with Islamic or Hindu creation theories, I guess). But that still leaves open the question of what 'lower case ID' is actually proposing. That's the crucial question in my opinion.
Darwin thought Paley presented his argument in an effective manner. I think I read that he modeled the structure of Origin of Species on Paley's work. (That's just an aside.)
You seem to have summarised Paley's arguments well, as far as I understand them. My question about (religion free) intelligent design is, "Is there any other way we might test the idea, given the century and a half advantage of understanding and technique that we have?"
My remarks about Paley were intended to provide an answer to your question about what signature intelligent design might have in our universe, if it was present. Paley and his contemporaries thought that they could recognize it in complex teleological systems in nature, exemplified by biological organisms.
Since it is a work in progress (which is largely what makes it interesting, at least to me) it seems foolish to exclude from consideration a possible, natural explanation for some of the currently poorly understood aspects of evolution.
Maybe hypothetically, at some time in the future. But if 'lower-case' ID is going to be a 'natural explanation' for anything, its content and its details need to be filled in first. 'Lower-case ID' needs a lot of work, in order to raise it above the level of a speculative possibility to the status of a scientific theory. What is the nature of the "intelligence" (presumably nothing religious) that supposedly produced the "design"? What was this intelligence's mode of action in realizing this design in what we observe?
One reason why the theory of biological evolution by natural selection can be criticized is because it makes its details known. So it's possible to question whether the theory can account for particular observations.
I don't see how that's possible with ID, whether of the upper-case or the lower-case variety.
The upper-case monotheistic variants of ID posit (for religious reasons) the existence of a designer that's typically believed to be omnipotent. It can do anything, so that any conceivable state of affairs is consistent with its action. And its mode of action is said to be miraculous, so that there's no understanding of how the design was actualized in what we observe. There's no way of testing whether the theory actually works, no way of determining whether the theory is consistent with observation. (There may be difficulties like the problem of evil, but God works in mysterious ways.)
The lower-case versions of ID are largely blanks at the moment. There have been suggestions that maybe aliens have designed and have guided the elaboration of life on earth. Stitchen-style ancient astronaut hypotheses seemingly propose something like this, where humans were genetically engineered by aliens. (Did the aliens devote their attentions to designing starfish and tube-worms too? Where did the almost infinite panoply of life on earth originate?) We know nothing whatsoever about these supposed super-powered aliens, and we have no reason to even believe that they exist. Nor do we know anything about their supposed modes of action.
An alternative to the alien-design theories can be found in the late 19th century, when many biological theorists proposed the existence of a vital life-force that shaped life into forms. This was an age that knew very little about developmental biology and next to nothing about its mechanisms and mode of action. It was profoundly mysterious to the Victorians how a fertilized egg could elaborate through fetal development into a hugely complex organism. Many biologists of the period imagined that they saw a mysterious formative power at work that wasn't consistent with known physics or chemistry. And obviously, if this mysterious power could shape fetal development, it could shape the whole history of life on earth. So these kind of theories became alternatives to Darwinism. It was believed that life has some mysterious force within it that inherently strives to achieve higher and higher forms. Today developmental biology is far better understood, and the formative life-force theories have faded away into the history of biology (except for Rupert Sheldrake who apparently still promotes them). Interestingly, developmental biology has merged seamlessly into the new synthesis of natural selection and genomics, another example of consilience.
So we are essentially in the same position with ostensibly secular 'lower-case ID' that we are in regarding the religious 'upper-case' variants. Neither variant constitutes a scientific theory that can compete with biological evolution by natural selection in providing explanations for whats biologists observe, in explicating the mechanism by which it came about, and in making testable predictions of what they are likely to observe in the future. We have to have some idea about what isn't likely to happen in a theoretical scheme, before we can possibly recognize observations that are inconsistent with it.
You asked up above how we might test lower-case theories of ID. My answer is that we can't, there's no way, until the ID theories flesh themselves out with content and details, explaining precisely what it is that they are proposing and how everything is supposed to work.
And you continue to classify all consideration of intelligent design as being connected with the dishonest, superstitious, unsubstantiated nonsense of Intelligent Design proponents. It is disappointing that you seem oblivious to that.
I wouldn't call believers in religious variants of ID "dishonest" or even "superstitious" (a word that typically refers to belief in folk magic). "Unsubstantiated" certainly does seem to fit their ideas.
But "unsubstantiated" is equally applicable to lower-case versions of ID as well. I don't think that ID becomes any better, or any more plausible, if religion is drained out of it. Its plausibility, and its status as a scientific theory, are functions of whether its details make sense, of its explanatory power and of the quality of the reasons we have for believing in it.