Intelligent design begins with observations about the types of information produced by intelligent agents. Even the atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins says that intuitively, "biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Darwinists believe natural selection did the "designing" but intelligent design theorist Stephen C. Meyer notes, "in all cases where we know the causal origin of 'high information content,' experience has shown that intelligent design played a causal role."
Intelligent design implies that life is here as a result of the purposeful action of an intelligent designer, standing in contrast to Darwinian evolution, which postulates that life exists due to the chance, purposeless, blind forces of nature.
Intelligent Design through the Scientific Method:
Observation -> Hypothesis -> Experiment -> Conclusion
1. Observation:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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, proponents conclude that they were intelligently designed.
November 1, 2005
MORE (Intelligent Design)
Source:
Center for Future Human Evolution
Center for Future Human Evolution
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