Bill Dembski has posted a long, detailed, and interesting piece on how to define “intelligent design.” I enjoyed it and learned from it, and I wonder if it might stimulate some interesting discussion here.
It is IMO a tragic fact that this is the same Bill Dembski who gave us the insipid and childish “are you a devoted Darwinist” rubbish pile, and if that’s all you know of Dembski then it would be reasonable to avoid reading anything he writes and to wonder if I have recently hit my head. And this new piece does include plenty of the simplistic piffle that ID can’t live without – most notably to me the tedious caricatures of “Darwinism.”
But there’s some good stuff in here, I think. About what design is, about how it was contemplated by Aristotle and others, even about information. There’s some basic but interesting etymology. Here are some excerpts that I thought were worthy of thought:
The current standard definition of intelligent design, when confronted with Dawkins’ blind watchmaker argument, thus leads to a problematic dialectic. This dialectic pits intelligent or teleological causes against unintelligent or blind causes. The intelligent causes produce patterns best explained as the product of intelligence. The unintelligent causes, such as natural selection acting on random variations, produce patterns that appear to be designed although their explanation requires no appeal to actual intelligence.
This dialectic is problematic because it suggests a natural world in which intelligent and unintelligent causes mix indiscriminately, with no principled way of teasing them apart.
Dembski is right that Dawkins (and many others) agree that “unintelligent causes” result in things that “appear to be designed.” Here is how Dembski describes design (after Aristotle):
Not only did Aristotle know about the distinction between information and matter, but he also knew about the distinction between design and nature. For him, design consists of capacities external to an object. Design brings about form with outside help. On the other hand, nature consists in powers internal to an object. Nature brings about form without outside help. Thus in Book XII of his Metaphysics Aristotle wrote, “Design is a principle of movement in something other than the thing moved; nature is a principle in the thing itself.” In Book II of his Physics Aristotle referred to design as completing “what nature cannot bring to a finish.”
He ends with this clunky definition of “intelligent design,” which he thinks is an improvement over “the current standard definition.”
Intelligent design is the study of systems whose information output is best explained as the result of intelligently inputted external information rather than the inherent capacities of the systems.
There are some suspiciously, erm, flexible terms in there (“systems,” “external,” even “explained”) with a history of laugh-out-loud misuse by IDists. But Dembski adds commentary on the definition, and I thought it was a good read.