"I insist that the scope of the pronoun 'it' be restricted to various forms of complexity." You in fact appear to insist that "it" be limited to "irreducible complexity." If there are other types of complexity that you would include in the "it," then please tell us.

"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." But that assumes that both: (1) nothing else can explain it, and (2) that design can. As to the first, that is an impossible criterion to meet: how would we ever know that nothing else could explain it? I would suggest that to be fair to ID, we might say "if nothing else can currently explain it better." After all, that is an essential criterion for all scientific theories. Regarding the second, the "argument from ignorance" is that we do not currently know what could explain something, so that we should give up and label it something unexplainable. The question is whether ID can in fact explain it. No ID conjecture put forth so far does; and I am doubtful that ID explanations actually can explain. Note that inferences of human design do explain phenomena. That a stone tool has a given appearance is explained: the stone tends to flake in given ways, those who make stone tools tend to make them in given ways, anthropologists who learn to make stone tools have learned given limitations to the process, the known needs for survival suggest specific types of tools will be useful or needed, and so on.

What is known about the possibilities references geology, chemistry, physics, anthropology, and so on -- knowledge from a coterie of fields. All of these go into the making not only of means of detecting human design among stones but also an explanation of such design. Where does ID explain the bacterial flagellum? It does not. It simply asserts that it was designed, gives its arguments for that (based on probability calculations that rely on unsupportable assumptions), and stops -- it does not go on to explain anything. By contrast, evolutionary theory explains pathways by which bacterial flagella could have come about (providing hypotheses that can be testable given the obtaining of needed data), explanations as to what the functions of various structures involved were at various stages in its development (generating hypotheses amendable to test), and drawing conclusions that are useful elsewhere in biology (and in science more generally) and which may generate new hypotheses amenable to test. Science always creates more new questions than it answers. What can ID claim?

"This is a simple induction from the fact that most IC things whose origin is clearly known to us are designed things." And many sharp objects clearly known to us are designed things. Does that mean that we must assume all sharp objects to be designed. Oh, but is the difference that IC objects could not have come about as easily as sharp objects, because taking any part away renders them less useful, nonuseful, or nonexistent? I believe that that is the argument. The issue is that we also know of many objects that meet that criterion that we do not think, much less know, to be designed. A natural bridge cannot exist if any part of its arch is removed; yet we not only think it came about undesigned, we have strong, well-supported models as to how it came about. In fact, how do we know that "most IC things" are designed? No, that was not your statement; it was "most IC things whose origin is clearly known to us." The problem is that that is a biased sample. We make certain things, we know them to be designed, these make up a large proportion of the things that we know. By the same light, we make certain IC things, we know they are designed because we make them, and these IC things make up a large proportion of the IC things we know about. If the induction is a simple one, I would argue that it is a biased, uninformed, simpleminded one.

"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 a total non sequitur. Yes, I think that this past-falsification argument is a valid one, but it is not the argument I made, which was about three of four possible scenarios. None of them referenced PAST falsification of design inferences, in fact referenced possible nondesign explanations, not any falsification of design arguments. In fact, I have been fairly careful to argue that knowing an unintelligent, natural process to have produced something does not of itself falsify all design conjectures -- that indeed some are beyond falsification. Knowing how something came about naturally and unintelligently may render some design inferences superfluous, but that does not mean that they are falsified, nor falsifiable. Professor Moody may disagree with that perspective, but I hold to it. So, when Moody says "This is rather odd coming from someone who, in the very same message, claims that ID cannot be falsified." That is understandable from two perspectives: (1) I did not say it; and (2) not all design inferences are ID inferences, in the sense of invoking an unknown designer. I have specifically noted that inferences about human design of stone tools, about human commission of murders, and so on are subject to falsification. I have my doubts about the falsification of those design inferences labeled "ID" without specifying anything about the designer.

"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." Moody does adduce. I don't buy it. The evil-spirit theory of disease ("ESTD") is not falsifiable at all, but it is superfluous, partly as a result (also by dint of our possession of much better explanations of disease). But I do suspect that ID has the same status as does the ESTD: useless, superfluous, nonfalsifiable. In fact, the ESTD approach may even have more going for it, in that it has generated hypotheses that are clearly falsifiable because falsified; but maybe ID just isn't old enough to have generated as many falsehoods as has the ESTD. Likewise, phlogiston theory of fire - maybe it has not been falsified, maybe phlogiston has negative mass surprisingly close in magnitude to the positive mass of oxygen. But phlogiston theory is still superfluous.

"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." Š "It's rather that ID is the normal explanation for IC." No, the burden is still on the ID advocate to show: (1) that IC things really do make up such a category; (2) that the sample is not biased; and (3) that IC is a more important grouping category than those thus far found useful by science.

Meanwhile, I am still not convinced that this is not all just ID by default, aided by a likely-biased sampling into a questionable category.

-- James Swan, Professor, Wichita State University (posted 2/12, 9:45 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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