Stephen Barr misunderstands the place of natural laws and regularities in design inferences. Barr writes:
…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God.
Frank Beckwith (in the comments following Barr’s post) echoes the misunderstanding:
As I have already noted, the ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends.
Hm. To quote Hamlet (Act 2, scene 2): “Nay, that follows not.” Here’s a vignette to make the point.
Imagine visiting a large hospital. You’re taken to the post-operative unit. Sitting up in bed is a young man, whose right hand was just successfully reattached to his arm after an industrial accident.
The following dialogue ensues. Peter Sellers will play the role of the visitor:
Clouseau: Bonjour, I am Inspector Clouseau of the Sûreté. Now, my young friend, I suppose that man standing over there performed the surgery?
Patient: He’s the janitor.
Clouseau: Yes, I see. And the janitor could not have reattached your hand?
Patient: Mostly he empties the trash and mops up. Nice guy. But I don’t think he knows —
Clouseau: And how about her?
Patient: She’s a nurse.
Clouseau: You have something against nurses, eh?
Patient: No, she’s great. She checks my vitals —
Clouseau: But she did not reattach your hand. That is what you are telling me?
Patient: Well…yeah. I think the surgeon reattached my hand. In fact, I know he did, because he’s the only person here with the skills. Hey, I can wiggle my fingers! Isn’t that amazing?
Clouseau: Please do not change the subject. You are anti-janitor, sir. And anti-nurse.
Patient: Say what?
Clouseau: You suffer from the lamentable “surgeon-of-the-gaps” mentality. C’est vrai, I have seen this odd syndrome before. How can you be certain that the janitor didn’t do it? Or the nurse? Eh? Have you determined exhaustively that no janitor, anywhere in this hospital — vraiment, anywhere in the whole physical universe, because that is what we are talking about! — cannot reattach a severed hand?
Patient: [apprehensively looking around for security] It’s possible, I guess.
Clouseau: Of course it is possible! Ha, these are childish games, these “surgeon” inferences. We must interrogate the janitorial staff first, every last man of them. Then the nurses. Then — yes — the parking lot attendants.
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Okay, enough of that. The moral:
Saying that a physical or natural regularity is causally insufficient to produce a particular effect is no more unreasonable than saying it is unlikely the janitor performed the surgery.
This is not to deny the causal reality of physical regularities. Gravity works. The janitor mops up. And without janitors — and nurses and parking lot attendants and all the rest — hospitals could not function. But Clouseau will waste his time interviewing those people, if he genuinely wants to know who reattached the severed hand successfully.
You need a surgeon for that, meaning a cause sufficient to produce the effect in question.
But it does not follow from inferring a surgeon acted that janitors and nurses do not act, or that they are not needed, or do not play a necessary role in the overall operation of the hospital. They (obviously) do.
They just don’t perform surgery.
That’s not waiting for science to fail. The matching of effects to their true causes is what science does.
As in, the whole point of the enterprise.