Defining intelligent design

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Intelligent design is the scientific investigation of intelligent causation and subsequent novel data, hypotheses, experiments, and practical applications that are derived by viewing specific phenomena in the universe as designed. Intelligent design is a scientific hypothesis that seeks to explain a very large range of scientific data, and so has a general definition, and then subsidiary definitions for use within specific disciplines.

Overview of Intelligent Design

Intelligent design (also known as "ID") is an empirical approach to the scientific study of how nature works. Theorists and researchers exploring the idea of intelligent design are seeking to derive an understanding of nature from scientific data and the cause-and-effect structure of the universe.[1]

First, ID scholars consider what the scientific data tells us about the types of physical effects that are known to be produced only by intelligent causes. A few examples of effects of intelligence are novel and independent functional information, novel functional machines, and highly constrained goal-oriented processes. In this way, design theorists are investigating which effects can only be caused by intelligence. In order to determine this, a scholar must have a great deal of scientific knowledge about what unguided processes can do, and an objective evaluation of what unguided processes cannot do.

Second, ID scholars ask whether these types of structures can be found in nature. By consulting the cause-and-effect structure of the universe, and considering which causes result in which effects, it can be clearly seen that, in fact, many phenomena found in nature are only known to be caused by intelligence. Some claim that physics and chemistry can explain the information in DNA, but natural laws do not dictate the sequence of bases in a gene. As Polanyi noted, "the information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA."[2] When these facts are considered, it is then seen that there is a great deal of scientific evidence that there are effects in the physical world that can only be caused by intelligence. Scholars open to intelligent design propose that specific physical phenomena in nature are better explained, and scientifically studied, as being designed by intelligence. The constant use of design language in biology demonstrates that it is better studied and understood as designed by intelligence.

Simply stated, ID begins by asking, "Can we scientifically detect if something was designed by intelligence?" Detecting design is a scientific possibility, and ID scholars think this ability is essential for a proper contextual study of the universe. Intelligent design seeks to find natural objects that contain the same final conditions, or physical histories, as objects that science knows were intelligently designed, based upon our observation of intelligent agency in the natural world. An important goal of research from a design perspective is to understand intelligence working in the context of the physical world, and infer intelligent activity by observation and analysis of data.

Equally or more important as the above explanation, is what follows from it: ID also proposes that specific physical phenomena in nature are better studied as being designed by intelligence. Because of this, intelligent design has been applied in the form of working scientific research programs by which novel data, hypotheses, experiments, and practical applications are derived by hypothetically viewing phenomena in the universe as designed, whether the researcher holds that the objects of study are actually designed or not.

So intelligent design is an inference, from the strength of empirical knowledge alone, that specific phenomena are caused by intelligence, and that these phenomena are better studied as instances of design.

Theoretically exploring design

Introduction

Intelligent design is a unique conjoining of scientific, mathematical, and investigative disciplines. Mathematics is utilized principally for probabilistic calculations of events. Knowledge from physics and chemistry enables observational accounts to correspond with empirical data. Special sciences such as archeology and forensics provide foundations for design criteria, while psychology and neuroscience lend premises for understanding intelligence. The observational method of investigation employed by intelligent design is derived from time-tested scientific methodology:

Causality

Intelligent design employs the principal of causality, or cause and effect, to study specific phenomena. The effects observed are design, with intelligence inferred as the cause.

Induction

Intelligent design operates by an inductive procedure of inquiry wherein science explores new areas of knowledge by moving from facts and data that are well-established, and extrapolating from those areas of knowledge into the obscure knowledge that is being pursued. More specifically, ID makes retrodictive inferences about the past from present evidence.

The purpose of using inductive reasoning by intelligent design is to formulate general principles based on specific observations of recurring patterns in samples. So, samples used in an inductive proposition must share one or a subset of designated properties. The induction holds if 1)the examples share the designated properties, and 2)the dissimilarities do not make a relevant difference to the property(ies) one wishes to explain.

So, how does ID utilize inductive reasoning when it proposes that the characteristic of design, or a purposeful arrangement of parts, is found in phenomena? Design can be found in phenomena we factually know were intelligently designed, and design can also be found in phenomena where the cause is not known, e.g. specific microbiological components, certain aspects of the universe, and the universe as a whole.

When considering the biological and microbiological realm, ID proposes that specific features of living cells and features of man-made machines share the characteristic of design, or a purposeful arrangement of parts.

The likenesses between man-made information structures and bio-informational structures are so strong, that they are by definition the same type of phenomena. Additionally, the likenesses between man-made mechanical structures and bio-molecular machines are so strong, indeed, the likenesses are so close; by definition they are the same type of phenomena.

When considering the universe, ID proposes that specific cosmological features have the characteristic of purposeful arrangement of parts, since the multitude of natural forces, universal constants, and fundamental characteristics are supremely fit for the purpose of allowing life to exist.

Uniformity

ID is an application of the principle of uniformity to observed phenomena which have the characteristic of design. The basis used in this observation is the verifiable fact that intelligent agents use building techniques that:

  • infuse large amounts of information into data structures at one time
  • develop complex communication systems
  • make production capabilities based on informatic code
  • channel energy through nonrandom pathways
  • involve very complicated development processes
  • bring about results that are of infinitesimally small probability
  • utilize high quantity and quality of coordinated parts
  • more here...

These are capabilities we see intelligent agents employing, and these capabilities are exactly what we see in living systems.

Uniform sensory experience

Another aspect of uniformity utilized by empirical science is the uniform experience of the senses.[3] ID employs uniform sensory experience by noting that that certain effects, especially functional information, have only one repeatedly and uniformly observed cause; intelligence.

Statistical probability

Intelligent design premises are based on a statistical warranted inference, called the Design Inference. This probabilistic inference is being developed by a mathematician and philosopher named William Dembski, who has named the main premise of the inference Specified Complexity. Specified Complexity probabilistically sifts through possible causal explanations, eliminating non-teleological causes that do not work towards an intended goal, leaving the researcher to a statistically warranted inference to design.

Causal adequacy

ID proposes that specific natural phenomena that give the appearance of design may have a fundamentally intelligent cause. By inductive logic, intelligence is proposed as the cause for the characteristic of design in specific phenomena.

  • There is no verifiable scientific evidence for an ateleological origin of designed phenomena. The insistence that designed objects in nature have an ateleological origin rests on metaphysical arguments, not scientific ones. In addition to this complete lack of evidence, it is extremely improbable that chance and necessity gave rise to these designed phenomena.
  • However, there is reliable and verifiable evidence demonstrating that intelligence can form these structures, making intelligent design a viable explanatory option.
Interpretation
In interpretation, it is a purely a posteriori and inductive argument based on the repeated application of the cause and effect between the well-established effects of intelligent causes and specific attributes of phenomena in nature.

Design Heuristics

Design-theoretic premises lead logically and immediately to hypothetical scientific research programs through which novel data, testable hypotheses, experiments, and practical applications are derived by hypothetically viewing certain phenomena in the universe as designed, whether the researcher holds that the objects of study are actually designed or not.

Key Definitions

Intelligence

- a characteristic of a phenomenon in which it is capable of undertaking the conceptualization and actualization of a plan and/or forward-thinking

Design

- a purposeful arrangement of parts, typically understood as the actualized products of intelligence

Physical Effects of Intelligence

ID researchers claim that certain processes and patterns have the potential of being unique to intelligent causation. Where the causal history of a phenomenon is known, there are certain characteristics and patterns that, while not necessarily present in all things designed, are never present in things that are known to be the result of unintelligent processes. The principle patterns currently under consideration are highly specific, informational, or functional. Some physicists assert that the respective values of the natural forces (like gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces), constants (like the coefficient of friction), and characteristics (like space-time) bespeak a universe so supremely fit for life that design is a reasonable inference. From biology, functional information in DNA or functional patterns in proteins indicate the presence of design. Other considerations include systems that are proposed to be highly improbable through non-teleological causes, like blood-clotting cascades.

Darwin, design, logic, and intelligent causes

In chapters one and two of his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used intelligent causes with analogical reasoning for explaining the role natural selection may serve in biology. Intelligent design uses intelligent causes with inductive reasoning for explaining the role intelligent causes may serve in biology. Compare the following two examples:

  • If we know that artificial selection can intelligently cause specific biological occurrences,
  • then unintelligent processes can act analogously and provide explanations for all biological occurrences.[4]
  • If we know that artificial selection can intelligently cause specific biological occurrences,
  • then intelligent causes can provide explanations for other specific biological occurrences.

In these particular statements, the induction of intelligent design is stronger than the Darwinian analogy. By retaining both and only those elements identified from the first premise over to the second premise, the logical induction of intelligent design is more valid and sound than the Darwinian analogy. Unless we can systematically verify the possibility of unintelligent causes producing codes and information explosions, then intelligent design remains the stronger conclusion. In this way, intelligent design is falsifiable. Biologists and other scientists have been studying unintelligent processes for many years, and no process has been observed or inferred that can cause the emergence of codes or de novo and independent functional information. Codes and new functional information, that is not dependent on other instances of bioinformation, habitually arises from intelligent causes.

Empiricism & Rationalism

Stepping back and taking a historical perspective, today's origins controversy seems to fit well into the centuries old rationalist vs. empiricist debate. In rationalism, the data must be made to fit the theory. In empiricism, the data informs the theory. It seems that when they intersect scientific reasoning, young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, and Darwinian evolution have all been influenced by rationalism. The obvious examples of this are the "God wouldn't do it that way" premises that come from non-ID camps.[5] The ideas of Darwinian evolution are that the biological law of variation and selection creates the entire biological world, and the data must be made to fit that preconceived framework. The ideas of creationism come from particular interpretations of the Bible, and the data must be made to fit that preconceived framework.

ID is an empiricist movement, reacting to the excesses of rationalism in young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, and Darwinism. It is time to let the evidence speak for itself. Data pouring in from experiments show that unguided processes are not sufficient to explain the information content of DNA. At the same time, ID recognizes that intelligent causation is real, and it is a scientifically and physically verifiable aspect of the universe. ID calls for a data driven approach. Whereas rationalism is somewhat easy to characterize since it promotes specific ideas up front and lays down the rules of science, empiricism is more difficult to characterize because it is looking to the data for new ideas and what the rules of science ought to be. Most ID theorists argue that ID should not have hard and fast rules, or definitions attached, unless the data fully justify them. A unique characteristic of ID is that a minimalist approach is appropriate, in order to give the data room to speak.

Another facet of the conflict between empiricism and rationalism is unexamined alternatives. When one says that the answer to a particular question must be A or B, then one is making the a priori assumption that A and B cover the water front. This more subtle form of rationalism is common. But how do we know there aren't other possible answers? ID does not make such truth claims, but rather is limited to things like truth claims from data and claims about how nature works.

Given the emergence of genetic engineering, and the use of teleological heuristics in biology (relating biology to computational phenomena like information, messaging, codes, algorithms, error correction, and machine phenomena like locomotion motors, transportation vehicles, roadways, scissors, grinders), intelligent causes of biological change cannot be ruled out a priori. Given Darwin's analogical usage of intelligent causes, intelligent causes per se must be equally considered. Thomas Kuhn noted that new scientific theories succeed when they better account for previously-existing data, and ID definitely accounts for the complex machines we know fill the cellular world.[6]

Intelligent causation is real, and it is a scientifically and physically verifiable aspect of the universe. The use of teleological heuristics in biological reasoning is real. Both Darwin and genetic engineering demonstrate the use of intelligent causation when reasoning about biology. A major question that remains is the degree of reliability in empirically detecting intelligent causes, and this is an important scientific quest taken up by intelligent design.

Design Detection

Overview

In Detecting Design in the Natural Sciences, William A. Dembski explains how an intelligent agent acts when designing:

"How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object..."

Grappling with these four steps, and developing means to detect them, is part of the task of ID.

In current methods of detecting design, steps two and three are particularly significant, because they involve the conceptualization of a choice, or directed contingency. Directed contingency often involves the development or construction of a pattern, a purposeful arrangement of parts, which can be empirically investigated.

Mathematical Techniques

Overview

Mainly through the utilization of probability, the effects of intelligence, chance, and necessity are sifted in order to determine if intelligence has played a causal role in the history of a phenomenon. Currently, certain types of complex and specified information are the principle subjects of this study.

Complex Specified Information

Specifications are patterns delineating events of small probability whose occurrence cannot reasonably attributed to chance, giving warrant to the idea that the event is attributable to intelligence. Complexity is the statistically calculated likelihood of an event.

Complex Specified Information, also known as Specified Complexity, is an attribute of events that are very unlikely (i.e. high Shannon information), very complex (i.e. high Kolmogorov complexity), and are specified (i.e. there is a description of them that is in some sense independently given).

It is claimed that if complexity and specification occur in tandem, the event is nearly impossible, so profoundly unlikely that it is not considered in the realm of reason to expect it to happen by the random effects of chance, necessity, or their cooperation.

It is accepted by design theorists that there exist biological structures with high CSI, so such a proposal, if accurate, would be problematic for certain anti-design assumptions of current evolutionary biology and other sciences.

See Specified Complexity for more detail.

Irreducible Complexity

Irreducible Complexity is a special case of Specified Complexity. A structure is considered to be Irreducibly Complex when all its component parts are required for the system to function. For example, a car will generally not be Irreducibly Complex - removing the chassis doesn't stop the car from moving - but a precision-engineered motor will usually be nearly Irreducibly Complex.

It is readily apparent that Irreducibly Complex structures cannot "directly" evolve, i.e. there is no way to build an IC structure to perform a given task out of a simpler system that also performs that task. The stronger claim has been made that IC structures cannot evolve by any means, direct or otherwise, without intelligence playing a causal role. If true, this claim would be problematic for certain anti-design assumptions of current evolutionary biology, as there are some biological structures that would appear to be Irreducibly Complex.

See Irreducible Complexity for more detail.

Applying Design Detection

Overview

The more specific the goals and requirements, the more complex, accurate, and precise the design will be and therefore, the more apparent and obvious the design will be for detection through functionality. An example of this can be seen in the progressive increase in functional complexity, accuracy and precision that can be detected between a sundial, a wrist watch, and an atomic clock.

For more on the subject of Applying Design Detection we need to also look into the subject of Designed Systems.

Cosmological Design

Certain features of the universe, including the observation that life is possible within it, are best explained by intelligent causation operating in conjunction with undirected processes, blind natural forces and laws, and random chance. Over thirty parameters of the universe have been identified that must be within very narrow ranges for any kind of conceivable life, not just life as we know it, to exist at any time in the history of the cosmos. Although some scientists see these features as merely "coincidental" values, intelligent design researchers propose that the universal constants of physics and the natural laws point, rather, to intelligence as playing a fundamental causal role in these aspects of the physical world. This is one clue of whether mind preceded matter, and one of biggest problems in physics today. Intelligent design is the only idea which adequately explains the fine tuning of the universe. This is held as a sort of trade secret of theoretical physics. Another clue is that according to quantum theory, experimentally verified to some extent, matter exists in a state of probability waves until an intelligent observer comes along which causes the wave function to collapse into one of the possible fixed outcomes. This is tantalizing evidence that mind preceded matter - the universe itself couldn't exist without first having a universal observer.

Biological Design

Intelligent design investigates whether certain subsets of biological phenomena have resulted from the empirically recognizable effects of intelligence. ID proposes that current and plausible scientific methods can empirically detect whether the "apparent design" in biological entities, acknowledged by virtually all biologists, is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process, such as natural selection acting on random variations.

Limitations of design detection

Currently, methods of design detection have inherent limits. These limits seem theoretically insurmountable, without further knowledge of the causal history of the object or event under study.

1) ID-detection methods are able to detect almost everything in the universe that is designed, but exceptions do exist.

  • Anything designed to mimic blind necessity cannot be detected as designed, without particular knowledge of its causal history. Yet, this concern is belayed by reality, since intelligent agents rarely set out to imitate nature in an undetectable way. (That is to say, intelligence tends to act in accord with its unique nature.) Additionally, such imitations of nature will not concern ID-detection and many of its applications within the ID-paradigm.

2) ID-detection can identify that something is not designed with high reliability, but not with absolute reliability.

  • This follows from the fact that intelligence rarely imitates nature, but blind necessity cannot imitate many of the unique abilities of intelligence. Nevertheless, science does not deal in absolutes; it only deals in provisional acceptance pending subsequent data. As a scientific undertaking, detection can only claim that based on reasonable and knowledgeable inferences, intelligence is the most likely cause.

3) Designs that are given subtle or vague general goals are more difficult to detect purpose and design. An example of a vague goal is as in the general purpose designed into an object to "provide fun".

Subsidiary views of Intelligent Design

Citations

  1. ↑ James E. Horigan used the term "intelligent design" in his book Chance or Design? in much the same way that future scholars and researchers in the intelligent design community would frame their empirical approach. For example he wrote:
    • "Any consideration of the idea of a designed universe raises, of course, the question of purpose. To hold that the universe was intelligently designed is to expect that an intelligent Designer would have had reason and purpose to bring the universe, and all that lies within it, into existence. The remarkable purposefulness we will consider in the natural world herein is of itself not demonstrable of ultimate purpose. When one seeks to argue to the existence of an ultimate Designer of the universe on the strength alone of inferences arising from present-day empirical knowledge, and without resort to biblical or other religious references, it restricts one's possible avenues of explanation of purpose that could otherwise be available. No doubt some will find this approach to be in error."
    • James E. Horigan (1979) Chance or Design? (Philosophical Library).
    Selected quotes available from: http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXXV_1982/XXXV-17.pdf
  2. ↑ Michael Polanyi, “Life's Irreducible Structure, Polanyi, M. 1968, Science Vol. 160: no. 3834 pp1308-1312. See also: Michael Polanyi, “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,” Chemical & Engineering News (August 21, 1967): 62.
  3. ↑ Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
  4. ↑ "Before applying the principles [of artificial selection] arrived at in the last chapter to organic beings in a state of nature…"
    • Darwin, Charles (1893) The origin of species by means of natural selection; or, The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. New York: D. Appleton and Co., (quote is from the first line of chapter two) text available online.
    “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”[emphasis added]
    • Darwin, Charles (1893) The origin of species by means of natural selection; or, The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. New York: D. Appleton and Co., (quote is from the first line of the last paragraph of the book) text available online.
  5. ↑ ‘no sane creator ... would have conceived on his drawing board’ Dawkins says. (Dawkins, R., Climbing Mount Improbable. Penguin, 1996, pg. 121.)
  6. ↑ Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (University of Chicago Press, 1972), pgs. 78-80.

See also...

External Links

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