Sunday, January 09, 2005

Intelligent Design, a very short summary...

"THINK OF MOUNT RUSHMORE—what about this rock formation convinces us that it was due to a designing intelligence and not merely to wind and erosion? Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point us to an intelligence. Such features or patterns are signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, are not content to regard such signs as mere intuitions. Rather, they insist on studying them formally, rigorously and scientifically. Intelligent design is the science that studies signs of intelligence. Note that a sign is not the thing signified. Intelligent design does not try to get into the mind of a designer and figure out what a designer is thinking. Its focus is not a designer’s mind (the thing signified) but the artifact due to a designer’s mind (the sign). What a designer is thinking may be an interesting question, and one may be able to infer something about what a designer is thinking from the designed objects that a designer produces (provided the designer is being honest). But the designer’s thought processes lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such."
(The Design Revolution
By William Dembski :33)