I started this ‘blog in October, 2004. But when I discovered the Tangled Bank series of blog compendia, I went back and added all of them back to the first, from April 21, 2004. Browsing through Tangled Bank #13, I found a link to the Panda’s Thumb page formally introducing Multiple Designers Theory. Dr. Richard B. Hoppe systematizes previous suggestions that ID is better explained by many designers rather than one. That refinement of ID theory enables him to outline an ID-based research program. Oddly, though, in the intervening three years we’ve heard no substantive proposals from the ID to identify and distinguish designers by their aims or characteristics.
From the Preface:
The last dozen years has seen a recrudescence of the Payleyist Argument from Design, the argument that because biological phenomena may appear to be designed, there must be an Intelligent Designer of those biological phenomena…. Unfortunately, there are no scientific alternatives to evolutionary theory available to be taught…. Multiple Designers Theory is that revolutionary change…
