“The answer, of course, has to be that if the universe was designed, the designer must be super-intelligent — which, IMHO, means teleological / design arguments have to point to God, not to an unidentified designer”

Interesting point, but to play Devil’s Advocate, there can exist a non-god super-intelligence. Therefore it doesn’t follow that just because the Designer has the attribute of super-intelligence they must be a god. (But as more and more of these attributes build up, such as supreme galaxy-forming power, time transcendence, etc, we would begin to rule out unlikely candidates, such as “stupid” aliens. : ))

Ok, I see that reference — though it’s contradicted by the reference to climate science.

One could also argue the converse: if highly intelligent creatures can’t properly design something as relatively simple (compared to the human body, say, or the universe) as an airplane, why is it reasonable to assume that something as complex as the universe was designed? If experience shows that there is always an error rate in any design, and that the error rate tends to increase as the design’s complexity increases, wouldn’t that suggest that a designed universe would be grossly disfunctional? (The answer, of course, has to be that if the universe was designed, the designer must be super-intelligent — which, IMHO, means teleological / design arguments have to point to God, not to an unidentified designer).

D., I think the correct analogy would be as follows: “Yeah, and this morning my laptop crashed, so therefore I conclude that it’s unlikely that living creatures, far more complex than my laptop, are the result of blind evolutionary processes in which the badly-functioning assemblies were filtered out by natural selection. Right.”

I’m with you TRoutMac. We now have conclusive, logical, scientific, overwhelming evidence that the planes were not designed.

Wait……what, that doesn’t follow?

No, but there’s nothing terribly interesting about that vis a vis either global warming or ID, either. I made a mistake this morning and misspelled a word in an email. Can I therefore conclude that all the science behind global warming is mistaken too?

all scientific conclusions are subject to revision when the next piece of data comes in.

Well, sort of. For most research programs, one anomalous datum is unlikely to overturn the whole program (cf. Lakatos here), though it could be possible depending on the specific program and datum. If you want to say we shouldn’t act on climate models concerning global warming, you have to do more than suggest generally that “people make mistakes.”

The comparison is that such failures highlight the fact that humans have finite knowledge, not infinite knowledge.

Yes, our knowledge does expand. But it’s still far short of infinite. It’s not that “all scientific conclusions are junk,” as you put it, but rather that all scientific conclusions are subject to revision when the next piece of data comes in.

In other words, humans don’t know everything and we make mistakes. Nothing controversial about that, is there?