Paradigm Dawning - A fresh look at intelligent design
From ResearchID.org
- Read how the researchers, scholars, and theorists of the ID community understand the concept.
Intelligent design (also known as "ID") is an empirical approach to the scientific study of how nature works. Theorists and researchers exploring the idea of intelligent design are seeking to derive an understanding of nature and design from scientific data and the cause-and-effect structure of the universe.
An important goal of research from a design perspective is to understand intelligence working in the context of the physical world, and infer intelligent activity by observation and analysis of data. Intelligent design seeks to find natural objects that contain the same final conditions, or physical histories, as objects that science knows were intelligently designed, based upon our observation of intelligent agency in the natural world.
To do this, ID scholars first consider what the scientific data tells us about the types of physical effects that are known to be produced only by intelligent causes. Examples of effects of intelligence are novel and independent functional information, novel functional machines, and highly constrained goal-oriented processes. In order to determine this, a scholar must have a great deal of scientific knowledge about what non-intelligent processes can do, and an objective evaluation of what non-intelligent processes cannot do. In this way, design theorists are investigating which effects can only be caused by intelligence.
ID scholars then ask whether structures known to only be designed are found in nature. By consulting the cause-and-effect structure of the universe, and considering which causes result in which effects, it can be clearly seen that, in fact, many phenomena found in nature are only known to be caused by intelligence. When these facts are considered, it is then seen that there is a great deal of scientific evidence that there are effects in the physical world that can only be caused by intelligence. Scholars open to intelligent design propose that specific physical phenomena in nature are better explained as caused by intelligence.
Simply stated, ID begins by asking, "Can we scientifically detect if something was designed by intelligence?" Detecting design is a scientific possibility, and ID scholars think this ability is essential for a proper contextual study of the universe.
Equally or more important as the above explanation, is what follows from it: ID also proposes that specific physical phenomena in nature are better studied as being designed by intelligence. Because of this, intelligent design has been applied in the form of working scientific research programs by which novel data, hypotheses, experiments, and practical applications are derived by hypothetically viewing phenomena in the universe as designed, whether the researcher holds that the objects of study are actually designed or not.
So intelligent design is an inference, from the strength of empirical knowledge alone, that specific phenomena are caused by intelligence, and that these phenomena are better studied as instances of design.
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