The Human Question

That's what happened when Darwin looked to Malthus for notions of the struggle for survival, competing for limited resources, and (in a later edition) survival of the fittest. Something like that might be the case when Dembski looks to a melange of disciplines he places under the umbrella "design theory" (e.g., forensics, cryptology, etc. and perhaps information theory) to empower his argument for intelligent design.

Most theories, once regarded as confirmed, become the basis for further studies directed not at reconfirming the original thesis but getting deeper insights. So what would happen if someone managed to confirm one instance of ID: what research program would follow? What deeper insights might one seek? I suppose one could turn to other events in nature and see if they too exhibit ID. One could keep busy dealing with new apparent counter-examples as well. And one would also keep pretty busy answering the never-ending objections of philosophical skeptics (perhaps one of those objections would be that "ID is just a theory...?"). The latter, however, might be a philosophical rather than a strictly scientific enterprise. But none of these controversies would actually move scientific knowledge forward to a new level. The only way in which that might happen would be by trying to discern what the intelligent designer is like. But that seems likely to be a dead end for science, for (as ...