Godtacular Notes - Intelligent Design

Isaiah 45:18 (New International Version)
18 For this is what the LORD says— 
      
he who created the heavens, 
    he is God; 
      
he who fashioned and made the earth, 
       he founded it; 
      
he did not create it to be empty, 
       but formed it to be inhabited— 
      
he says: 
       "I am the LORD, 
       and there is no other.

Psalm 102:25
 25 In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, 
      
and the heavens are the work of your hands.

Jeremiah 10:12
 12 But God made the earth by his power; 
      
he founded the world by his wisdom 
      
and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.

Psalm 139:13

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

Intelligent Design

What is intelligent design?
Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

Is intelligent design a scientific theory?
Yes. The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

May have religious implications but does not rely on religion.

Everything in our experience tells us that when information rich systems arise, it is due to an intelligent design. No naturalistic phenomenon produces information. Intelligences do.

So when we see DNA which is an amazingly complex "computer program" we infer to the best explanation.

Facets:

Inferring Design

Irreducible Complexity

Intelligent Design through the Scientific Method:
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1136

i. Observation:
The ways that intelligent agents act can be observed in the natural world and described. When intelligent agents act, it is observed that they produce high levels of "complex-specified information" (CSI). CSI is basically a scenario which is unlikely to happen (making it complex), and conforms to a pattern (making it specified). Language and machines are good examples of things with much CSI. From our understanding of the world, high levels of CSI are always the product of intelligent design.

ii. Hypothesis:
If an object in the natural world was designed, then we should be able to examine that object and find the same high levels of CSI in the natural world as we find in human-designed objects.

iii. Experiment:
We can examine biological structures to test if high CSI exists. When we look at natural objects in biology, we find many machine-like structures which are specified, because they have a particular arrangement of parts which is necessary for them to function, and complex because they have an unlikely arrangement of many interacting parts. These biological machines are "irreducibly complex," for any change in the nature or arrangement of these parts would destroy their function. Irreducibly complex structures cannot be built up through an alternative theory, such as Darwinian evolution, because Darwinian evolution requires that a biological structure be functional along every small-step of its evolution. "Reverse engineering" of these structures shows that they cease to function if changed even slightly.

iv. Conclusion:
Because they exhibit high levels of CSI, a quality known to be produced only by intelligent design, and because there is no other known mechanism to explain the origin of these "irreducibly complex" biological structures, we conclude that they were intelligently designed.

Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, states "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10^-12 grams, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world." In a word, the cell is complicated. Very complicated.

Examples:

Flagellum is like an outboard motor.
Human eye
Photosynthesis

Issues:

Evolutionists tell us that there could have been intermediate steps where seemingly irreducibly complex machines could perform other duties. For example, the parts of the flagellum that ID claims cannot be reduced may have evolved separately and performed other tasks along the way.
- Problems: these claims usually lack real evidence
- Even if it happened once, say for the flagelum. What about the many, many other irreducably complex things?

Cool thing: When we realize that an intelligence created the universe, science becomes a fun discovery where you can expect to find rationality and beauty.