I believe I have already responded to the argument from ignorance charge, but perhaps not well enough. Let me try again. Take Swan's paraphrase of my argument: "If nothing else can explain it, design wins by default." First, I reject the qualifying expression "by default" at the end, and I insist that the scope of the pronoun "it" be restricted to various forms of complexity. I think it is perfectly reasonable to say, of a given instance of IC that if nothing other than design can explain it, then design is the best explanation. This is a simple induction from the fact that most IC things whose origin is clearly known to us are designed things.

Swan continues, "(1) we do know how it could or did come about, but the design advocate does not know or accept this; (2) we know the pieces of the explanation but have yet to put them together; (3) we don't know but science can know or will know in future; or (4) we don't and cannot know but the phenomenon nevertheless did not occur by design."

This argument appears to amount to the argument that since design inferences have been falsified in the past, we should be skeptical of them now. This is rather odd coming from someone who, in the very same message, claims that ID cannot be falsified. I take it that Swan is thinking of something like the evil spirit theory of disease. If I may adduce the distinction between strong and weak falsification that I made in a message to Professor Ryan, the evil spirit theory has never been strongly falsified, nor could it be. It has been weakly falsified, and that is good enough. ID is falsifiable in precisely the same sense.

In any event, I agree that we should be skeptical of ID, but our skepticism, like all skepticism, must be defeasible, and it should not be allowed to ossify into an a priori filter. It really is the case that some things are not observed to exist except as a result of intelligent design. And it really is the case that while not all such things are IC, IC is nevertheless one of the things that exemplifies design. And this really does create prima facie warrant for an inference from IC to ID. And that is enough to shift the burden of evidence back onto the skeptic who says that the IC thing was not the work of a designer.

You see, it's not ID by default. It's rather that ID is the normal explanation for IC. An abnormal explanation for IC is of course possible, but it would need to be well supported to count as evidence against the normal explanation.

-- Todd Moody, assoc. prof. of philosophy, St. Joseph's University (posted 2/11, 11:00 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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