I have been invited to be a contributing author at Uncommon Descent, so I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself, and to explain the reasons for my interest in, and passion for, intelligent design, both as an intellectual endeavor and what I view as potentially the most profound revolution in the history of science.
Why does ID represent such a revolution? It is becoming increasingly clear that efforts to cram the evidence into purely materialistic causational categories are failing catastrophically on many fronts.
These include:
1) The origin of the universe — By definition this phenomenon could not have had a materialistic cause, because material did not exist “prior” to the origin of the universe, at which “time” neither matter, energy, space nor time existed.
2) Cosmological fine-tuning to permit life — This requires extraordinarily entertaining speculations to explain away.
3) The origin of living systems from non-living matter — This area of scientific research is clearly in a state of complete paradigm meltdown.
4) The origin of species and increasingly complex life forms through the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection — This is clearly no longer a tenable hypothesis, based on what is now known about the nature of living systems. However, I feel that we should give credit to Charles Darwin for having proposed what could have been a reasonable hypothesis in his day, considering the extremely primitive state of biological and information-theoretic science at that time.
It seems to me that all of this points in the same direction: The universe and living systems were purposed, and are the result of intelligent activity.
I was raised in a small university town, the son of a professor of physical chemistry who worked on the Manhattan Project. As such I was groomed from my early years with a passion for science and mathematics, and that passion persists to this day. After graduate school I pursued classical piano playing (but decided that I wanted to eat more than be an artist), and was the editor of a sport-aviation publication for many years. (I still love expressing ideas through the written word.) In the late 1980s I took up computer programming and developed an interest in artificial intelligence, and I currently earn my living as a software engineer for an aerospace research and development company. My specialty is writing guidance, navigation and control software for precision-guided airdrop systems.
One might suppose that this eclectic background provides no formal qualification for commenting on intelligent design, but I have an observation. I believe that it is a relatively recent integration of the sciences by people with disparate backgrounds (in mathematics, information theory, computer programming, chemistry, molecular biology, physics, and more) that has led to the design revolution.
ID will win in the end for a very simple reason: The evidence is overwhelming.