Why only one Designer

The Wedge Document seemed to sum it up nicely. I would argue that the nested hierarchy is much more consistent with multiple designers that are blind to each others designs. I see no other way to explain the nested hierarchy from a design perspective. Either that, or a single designer that slightly modifies pre-existing species and then suffers amnesia after designing the new species.IDer's like to cite archaeological artifacts as an example of evidence. If they were to stay true to this example they would use the same techniques. For example, there are many types of arrowheads. Differences in arrowheads are due to differences in cultural origins. That is, separate designers for different designs that originated from a shared historical archetype. Why shouldn't this same technique be used for life? Each life design group was given the basic metazoan layout and then each life design group changed things from there. This would be a much better explanation for why the cephalopod and vertebrate eye are so different, yet perform the same function. A single designer would have no problem mixing and matching different design units between cephalopods and vertebrates.IMHO, assuming that ID is true for the moment, the nested hierarchy screams multiple designers.

Given Dembski's complete failure of applying specified complexity to actual DNA sequences it would appear that SC has nothing to do with biology, either. Recently, there was a thread where the Uncommon Descent community was challenged to calculate the SC of some simple biological examples. No one was able to do it. It comes from the same place that all ID conclusions come from.

That's like saying that Brown's Hydroplate Theory is not the same as biblical creationism.The motivation of ID is to find some scientific sounding rationale for already held religious beliefs. ID is not motivated by scientific discovery or increasing our knowledge of the natural world. If it were we would see ID proponents doing scientific research. They aren't doing that research, nor do they have any intention of doing any research.Biblical creationism is a movement that looks to attack science that conflicts with the idea that God created through supernatural means. That is exactly what ID is, and that is exactly what the proponents of ID do. ID proponents attack evolution without ever supporting their ID claims with positive evidence. Behe's entire IC argument boils down to "Not evolution, therefore ID".

Behe argues that the differences between species can not be explain by evolutionary mechanisms. That is not what theistic evolution is.

Theistic evolutionists do accept the modern theory of evolution, so I guess Behe is not a theistic evolutionist.

In another post you say that Behe does not accept the theory of evolution. In message 53 you state:"Behe believes in the fact of evolution (nested hierarchy, fossil record, etc.) but not on the Neo-Darwinian mechanism."The Neo-Darwinian mechanism IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. How are they different? It is the same supernatural mechanism in both cases, isn't it? It would help if you would actually explain the differences instead of just saying that they are different.

That is exactly our point, so it would behoove you to actually address it. Physician, heal thyself. It makes your argument a red herring. We are not talking about Jesus' resurrection. We are talking about change in species over time.

I would argue that they are one in the same. The purpose of ID is to give a scientific veneer to dogmatically held religious beliefs. When you really push ID you always end up at the same place: It just looks designed because I think so. This is where the ID proponent started before looking at any of the evidence. Along the way you will stumble on arguments from ignorance and arguments from incredulity, but never arguments from positive evidence. The beginning of any ID investigation starts with a person's religious beliefs and never strays far from them. But it is inherently creationist, no matter what the religious flavor is.

I think the point being made is that reality is not forced to follow rules of parsimony. In science, we are trying to model reality so we must be careful to recognize the fact that parsimony is only a rule of thumb, not a natural law.A good example of this is DNA phylogenies. The tools used to construct DNA phylogenies rely heavily on rules of parsimony. For example, a shared base at an orthologous position is assumed to be a direct result of inheritance from a common ancestor. The rules throw out the possibility that the base changed somewhere in the lineage and then changed back to the ancestral sequence. However, anyone doing these analyses will readily admit that reverse mutations can happen.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

The data doesn't fit a single designer. An omnipotent designer would not need to reuse designs, as one example. For such a designer, starting from scratch for each and every species would be just as easy as making small tweaks to an existing design. On top of that, given convergent evolution it would appear that even a single non-omnipotent designer does not make sense either. Why else would single designer need to make the bat wing so different to the bird wing? Why the stark differences between the retina of the squid and vertebrate fish? And why would a single designer be restricted to a nested hierarchy? The only set of designers that makes sense, at least to me, is multiple designers that are blind to one anothers designs.