In this, Part 2 in a series of posts based on the Q&A section in the recently released DVD, Case for a Creator, I offer the text of Meyer’s response to the question, Why are many engineers intrigued by intelligent design theory?
As a software engineer — in both the artificial-intelligence and aerospace research and development fields — I recognized that there were huge problems with the thesis that natural selection and random variation could produce complex information-processing systems, because designing such systems is what I do.
Here are Meyer’s comments in answer to the question posed to him above:
The origin of a new structure, of a miniature machine, or an information-processing system, or a circuit, is an engineering problem. Oftentimes people have criticized the intelligent design movement because there are so many prominent professors of engineering in our number. But we don’t make any apologies for that, because engineers are precisely the scientists that know what it takes to design things, to build things. And the question of origins is essentially a question of engineering. How did these systems get built? And when you have so many top-level professors of engineering — in mechanical, electrical or software engineering — saying, I think we’re looking at systems that clearly show evidence of design, I think the Darwinists have a serious problem. If they can’t persuade those people, that the 19th-century mechanism of selection and variation is up to this task, I think that the theory is in serious trouble.