OK, Vaccine's suggestions for making irreducible complexity (or ID?) an adequate hypothesis make a good exercise...
The point of the abduction criteria is to compare hypotheses to determine which is the best explanation.
So to start, we need a clear statement of the hypothesis. Is it 'irreducible complexity' in one particular instance? Is it Intelligent Design in general?
What is the hypothesis we're assessing?
Only assuming his hypothesis is, "
there is no realistic, continuously functional Darwinian pathway from simple ancestor to present motor."
However, finding such a description is not a definitive test or falsification - it's open to debate because such a description would itself be an hypothesis. Falsification requires that you can make some real-world observation or experiment that shows the hypothesis to be wrong, such as finding a fossil mammal in the Cambrian.
Let's assume ID is the (ill-defined) hypothesis...
Without seeing the abstracts of the arguments on either side, I can only say that neither seem novel, definitive, or useful here, and their failures won't falsify either hypothesis.
As I understand it, the evolutionary argument is that we should expect to find
some non-functional DNA (e.g. from mutation); we know that some of the non-coding DNA previously labelled 'junk' is functional, but there are still large swathes of DNA with no known function. The default is to assume non-functionality until shown otherwise. ENCODE suggests 80% has 'biological activity', but not all biological activity is 'functional'. Also, non-functional DNA can become functional through mutation, so the non-functional expectation is necessarily probabilistic rather than absolute.
Also, I see no explanation for why ID should necessarily predict that non-coding DNA is functional, but in any case, the ID proponents have not demonstrated that all non-coding DNA
is functional (or that functional non-coding DNA
implies ID).
BUT the evolutionary hypothesis
does make a number of
strong predictions that are definitely fruitful. That your source has selected a weak and indeterminate prediction for the comparison is telling in itself.
Seriously? I read the first two:
Meyer says says that experience ("
experience-based analysis") tells him ID is "
causally adequate" to explain the Cambrian explosion... Meh.
Behe concludes, "
...decades of experimental laboratory evolution studies strongly suggest that, at the molecular level, loss-of-FCT and diminishing modification-of-function adaptive mutations predominate" (FCT is his code for a particular functional sequence) - right or wrong, it's not about ID.
A fruitful hypothesis makes novel predictions and gets them right. If that list contains such verified predictions, perhaps you could indicate which they are?
I previously explained why ID has no
explanatory power; in addition to what the link mentions, a key disqualifier is when an hypothesis raises more questions than it answers, especially if those questions are unanswerable. ID is such an hypothesis. You can't explain the unexplained with the inexplicable.
The multiverse is nothing to do with evolution. If you're comparing ID with evolution, ID introduces an additional (unexplained and inexplicable) entity, possibly with a lot of unstated extra baggage...
But if you do wish to compare ID with multiverse theories, it's worth noting that multiverse ideas don't necessarily involve infinite numbers of universes, and that they are not themselves scientific theories - they arise in or are
implied by various physical theories. That said, the idea that the multiverse multiplies entities rests on a misunderstanding both of multiverse ideas and Occam's Razor...
Sean Carroll says the first part best:
"
... we physicists sometimes muddy the waters by talking about “multiple universes” or “the multiverse.” These days, the vast majority of such mentions refer not to actual other universes, but to different parts of our universe, causally inaccessible from ours and perhaps governed by different low-energy laws of physics (but the same deep-down ones). In that case there may actually be an ensemble of local regions, and perhaps even some sensibly-defined measure on them. But they’re all part of one big happy universe."
And, for quantum mechanics:
"
The MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation) holds that we have a Hilbert space, and a wave function, and a rule (Schrödinger’s equation) for how the wave function evolves with time, and that’s it."
(that link is the best explanation of it I've seen).
To put it romantically, they're all 'ripples' in the one universal wave function, and quantum superposition is a glimpse of alternate realities before they decohere and you see just one... wherefore theology now?
As for Occam's Razor, in terms of competing theories it is interpreted to mean that the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.
In other words, the concern is with the simplicity of the theory itself, not with the simplicity of what it implies. For instance, the equations of relativity and quantum mechanics are simple (parsimonious), no matter that they entail views of physical reality that are much more complicated than the Newtonian view. This applies to multiverse ideas such as the 'Many Worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics (which is
misunderstood in other ways too).
