Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Kirk Durston offers a scientific method for design detection

Denyse O'Leary
August 2, 2019
Design inference, Intelligent Design
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Can this definition be applied in practice?

– Design application: the application of intelligence to first principles in physics to produce a desired effect (e.g., a smartphone).

– Design derivation: the reverse engineering of a complex effect back to first principles of physics for the purpose of discovering the design process and application (e.g., one company or country reverse-engineering the technology of another company or country).

– Design detection: the analysis of effects to determine which required intelligence to produce and which could be produced by nature (e.g., searching for the acoustic signature of a submarine amidst the natural background noise of the ocean).

From the three categories noted above, a possible definition of intelligent design can be formulated as follows:

“Intelligent design: an effect that required an intelligent mind to produce.”


Kirk Durston, “A Scientific Method for Design Detection” at Evolution News and Science Today

See also: Kirk Durston: What do we do when Darwinism looks less like science all the time

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Comments
The proposed definition does indeed seem inadequate. Firstly, the "effect" is not the "design", but the result of the design being then produced; E.g., the fossil record is not ID, but ID is the theory that explains the fossil record. One could also quibble that something obviously created by a mind need not necessarily be designed; E.g. a pile of junk. Finally is "intelligent mind" redundant? Can you have a mind (in the ID sense) without intelligence? Can you have intelligence without a mind? I guess it depends on how those two words are defined.Fasteddious
August 2, 2019
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The problem is that we already know that many aspects of our existence cannot possibly be formed by nature. The chirality of organic molecules present in all life here is flatly impossible by purely natural means, yet this has no effect on the unbeliever. Jesus himself testified of this reality when he said "if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." This refusal to acknowledge the realities shown to them by their own philosophy, this rejection of irrefutable truths demonstrated to them by their own preferred method of determining truth, is not symptomatic of a missing method for detecting design. It is symptomatic of a far more serious malady that their philosophy convinces them does not even exist.ScuzzaMan
August 2, 2019
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This seems inadequate. We already have a nice logical test for the necessity of design, in the form of Which First situations. In any aspect of life, from cells to tissues to individuals, there are trillions of Which First problems, where structure 1 would be totally useless and meaningless without Structure 2, and simultaneously Structure 2 would be meaningless and unnecessary without Structure 1. Neither could have arisen randomly on its own without the other being there first. Simply looking for "an effect" doesn't work even in the given example. Natural ocean noises (pre-life) include things like volcanic bubbles, which can exhibit a non-periodic pattern. Distinguishing volcanic bubbles from sonar bleeps would be impossible by "basic physics".polistra
August 2, 2019
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