divining design: part II

In a previous entry, I tried to show that Intelligent Design theorists have promulgated confusion about the nature and scope of ID theory--or, more properly understood, ID theories--by conflating biological and cosmological arguments, though each is built on a foundation of different claims, premises, and predictions, and has different metaphysical implications.

The few quotes I cited gave a preliminary look at the confusion, but hardly presented an airtight case. I assumed a level of familiarity (with Dembski's work in particular) as a background to my post. So, to clarify, I offer a series of excerpts from Dembksi's apologia for Intelligent Design, The Design Revolution. I have done my best to fairly quote, using ellipses only when necessary.

Click "read more" to see the full post.

Debmski lays out the limits of ID:

Insofar as design theorists do not bring up God, it is because design-theoretic reasoning does not warrant bringing up God. Design-theoretic reasoning tells us that certain patterns exhibited in nature reliably point us to a designing intelligence. But there's no inferential chain that leads from such finite design-conducting patterns in nature to the infinite personal transcendent creator God of the world's major theistic religions. Who is the designer? As a Christian I hold that the Christian God is the ultimate source of design behind the universe (though this leaves open that God works through secondary causes, including derived intelligences). But there's no way for design inferences from physics or biology to reach that conclusion. Such inferences are compatible with Christian belief but do not entail it (p. 25) [emphasis added].

Dembksi's "Big Tent" ID is further explained:

Intelligent design has theological implications, but it is not a theological enterprise. Theology does not own intelligent design. Intelligent design is not an evangelical Christian thing, or a generically Christian thing or even a generally theistic thing. Anyone willing to set aside naturalistic prejudices and consider the possibility of evidence for intelligence in the natural world is a friend of intelligent design. In my experience such friends have included Buddhists, Hindus, New Age thinkers, Jungians, parapsychologists, vitalists, Platonists and honest agnostics, to name but a few (p. 25).

Intelligent design is a strictly scientific theory devoid of religious commitments... [T]he designer underlying intelligent design need not even be a deity. To be sure, the designer is compatible with the creator-God of the world's major monoetheistic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the designer is also compatible with the watchmaker-God of the deists, the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus and the divine reason (i.e., logos spermatikos) of the ancient Stoics. One can even take an agnostic view about the designer, treating specified complexity as a brute fact inherently unexplainable in terms of chance and necessity (p. 44).

Dembksi compares ID with "scientific creationism:"

In contrast, intelligent design makes no claims about the origin or duration of the universe, is not committed to flood geology, can accommodate any degree of evolutionary change, does not prejudge how human beings first arose and does not specify in advance how a designing intelligence brought the first organisms into being (p. 44) [emphasis added].

Note that here, Dembksi refers solely to biological ID. When elsewhere defining "intelligent design," he stays on the same course:

The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there exist natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural causes and that exhibit feartures which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence (p. 45) [italics in original].

Intelligent design, conceived as a theory about the inherent limitations of undirected natural causes to generate biological complexity and the need for intelligence to overcome those limitations, is likewise a scientific theory (p. 48) [emphasis added].

Dembksi notes that intelligent design is not a theological "argument from design:"

By contrast, the design inference is a generic argument for identifying the effects of intelligence regardless of the intelligence's particular characteristics and regardless of where, when, how or why the intelligence acts. (The intelligence can be animal, human, extraterrestrial, singular, plural, immanent or transcendent.)

Yet elsewhere, in a non sequitur, Dembksi makes "intelligent design" into a metaphysical claim:

Intelligent design regards intelligence as an irreducible feature of reality. Consequently it regards any attempt to subsume intelligent agency under natural causes as fundamentally misguided and regards the natural laws that characterize natural processes as fundamentally incomplete (p. 148).