Rejecting ID, but is it a priori?

On a previous post Ray commented:

A religion or naturalism arrived at as a result of following the evidence where it leads, is quite acceptable, and even to be expected in most cases for it is a conclusion arrive at after an objective analysis of the evidence. It is therefore a reasonable conclusion.
Naturalism or a belief in ID, arrived at as a conclusion read into the evaluation of the evidence by, amongst other things, the exclusion of other potential conclusions on an ” apriori ” basis is quite another.

To either assume or exclude a Designer on an “apriori” basis, seems to me, to be fatal to an objective analysis of the question.
Nevertheless, I see that I will only be repeating myself and irritating the rest of you( not my intention). I’ve said my piece and I wish to thank all of you for your time.
God bless.

I don’t mind this topic at all, and as I commented in response, I don’t believe my rejection of ID is a priori (with a specific exception noted below). I immediately need to clarify that I do not reject a designer as such, but rather intelligent design as a scientific concept. From a theological point of view, I hold that the universe is designed and that God is the designer. I simply believe that the design is consistent and that it does not show “wrinkles” in the natural universe. I (intelligent design) and its claim that the designer can be detected scientifically at particular points in nature.

The problem seems fairly simple to me. One could say that science deals with two categories of processes or entities, which I will loosely call “things.” There are things that scientists do understand and things they don’t. Good scientists would like to improve their understanding of things they already understand and learn to understand those they don’t.

ID proposes to divide the things that we don’t understand into two categories–those we can theoretically hope to understand and those that must be attributed to a designer. Now as a scientific layman, I am mystified as to what benefit is to be derived from this new division. All it does is attempt to put a stop sign in front of certain processes for which it is assumed we will never find answers in the natural world.

And it is an assumption. Everything we understand about the natural world was once not understood, and in many, many cases there were people who assumed it could never be known. One of my frustrations in reading Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box was in the number of discoveries that Behe relates, and even does such a fine job of explaining. Yet he uses this progress of knowledge to support the claim that there’s a roadblock in the way now. Saying we can’t know something we don’t know is silly–after all, we don’t know.

Let me also dismiss the notion of a non-supernatural intelligent designer. There are two reasons. First, if the intelligent designer is itself natural, then it will simply require explanation as well. How did it come into existence? Second, if we are looking for a natural designer, it makes sense to try to discover the nature of that designer in order to be able to guess capabilities, limitations, intentions, and so forth. One piece of evidence that ID is not scientific is simply that its proponents show no curiosity about the nature of the designer. This very lack of curiosity indicates that they do know who they are proposing–God. But in the United States they need something that will pass church-state muster.

So now if we are looking for a supernatural designer, what exactly happens? First, we must assume that this designer is one who intervenes in the natural world and who does so in a detectable way. There is no reason that the designer must be detectable. The best design of a universe might well run its course (assuming it has one) without any intervention at all. Intervention need not be detectable. Supposing that some element of nature was made to appear completely random. With any care, our hypothetical supernatural designer could altar the random input in such a way as to be undetectable.

Second, if we assume that the designer is supernatural, it automatically operates outside the natural laws. Should a scientist come upon one of these unexplained processes, and attribute it to the designer, then he steps beyond something he can investigate using the methods of natural science. Here is where I could properly be accused of arguing something a priori. I think that by design and definition, scientific methods are not suited to studying the supernatural. If it is truly supernatural, then you cannot limit it by natural laws, thus it can do anything, and can be fitted anywhere. But that does not exclude a designer a priori, merely the detection of the designer by the methods of natural science.

If we have an intervening designer, what we will find is that there will be a number of points in nature that are not explained. We won’t know whether they could be explained naturally or not. Every system which has a Darwinian explanation for its development was once a system for which there was no such explanation. ID has not added anything whatsoever to our knowledge. Without a designer we have some things that are explained and some that aren’t. With a designer–same thing!

ID does have a massive disadvantage, however, in that once you claim something cannot theoretically be explained, you reduce or remove the motivation for studying it and learning what can be learned. And considering that there are things once declared irreducibly complex that have since been “reduced” so to speak, that roadblock in the path of knowledge is not a good idea.