What is Intelligent Design? If you ask a critic, he will probably tell you that ID is a disguised version of Creationism and nothing more than a Trojan Horse to get God taught in the public schools. If you ask a typical proponent of ID, he will probably tell you that ID is the best explanation for various biotic phenomena.

For me, ID begins exactly as William Dembski said it begins – with a question:

Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?

The first thing to note about the question is that you don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to ask it. You don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to consider it. In fact, you don’t even have to be a religious fundamentalist to answer it.

The question is a good one, as it stems from the fact that certain things do exist in our reality only because they were brought into existence by an intelligent cause. If human beings did not exist, for example, Mount Rushmore would not exist. Thus, Mount Rushmore’s existence is dependent on intelligent causation. So one begins to wonder if there are other aspects of our reality that are likewise dependent on intelligent causation. If so, can we detect them? If so, just how reliable is our detection?

This, in my opinion, is the very foundation of ID. It’s not a position or socio-political movement or a system of belief. It is a question and expression of curiosity.

When we consider Dembski’s question, many answer ‘no.’ That is, they insist that we need to have information about the designers and their methods to detect design. This is the designer-centric approach that has been called into question on TelicThoughts (see here, here, and here).

The main problem with the designer-centric approach is that the truth of a design inference does not entail that we would also have independent evidence of the designers and their methods. For example, if some form of ETI seeded this planet with life 3.5 billion years ago, this would not entail that we would have the ability to study the ETI today.

While I can respect the designer-centric approach, such that I do not demand its proponents abandon it, I think it illegitimate to expect everyone to answer Dembski’s question with a ‘no.’ In my mind, that is akin to throwing in the towel and giving up on an interesting question only because our current tools are inadequate to the investigative task. Yes, it is true that science relies on the designer-centric approach when it comes to things such as forensics and archaeology, but is this simply a matter of convenience or necessity?

If it is a matter of necessity, then it simply underscores the manner in which science is fundamentally limited in its ability to reconstruct the past. If intelligent design is indeed part of our biotic past, then science cannot ever hope to uncover it unless we are lucky enough to stumble upon the designers and/or their lab protocols and blueprints. Thus, science would be forced to look elsewhere and come up with an alternative story that does not involve intelligent design. While the non-teleological story may appear coherent and supported by pieces of circumstantial evidence, and while it can always be maintained with a bucket full of promissory notes, it would never converge on the reality of our past (again, assuming this reality includes ID).

The designer-centric approach not only gives up on the question of detecting design, but also gives up on trying to accurately reconstruct our past. There can be no evidence for design and there can be no evidence against design. Design would be forever hidden away firmly in our collective intellectual blind spot. The designer-centric position is thus fundamentally agnostic about ID.

On the other hand, things change if someone answers Dembski’s question with a ‘yes.’ At this point, we turn to these proposed methods for detecting design without the luxury of independent information about the designers. Do the methods work? If so, how reliable are they? And here you find all sorts of positions. The two most widely known methods are Michael Behe’s concept of Irreducible Complexity and William Dembski’s concepts of Specified Complexity and the Explanatory Filter. You will find people who think these methods have succeeded in detecting design and thus the payoff is in. On the other hand, you will find people who think these methods fail (this can either mean that there is no design or the methods are not up to the task of reliably detecting design). And then there are people somewhere in the middle (like yours truly), who is not convinced that the proposed methods have truly delivered a design inference, yet also think they are on the right track.

Thus, for me, ID becomes a challenging and exciting investigative search. If design, as a consequence of intelligent causation, exists amidst biotic reality, it might only be the most difficult question any investigator can address. The obstacles are many. And one of the most annoying obstacles is not from Nature herself. It comes from the manner in which many are willing to paint the investigator as deceptive apologist for sectarian views simply because the investigator finds the Question to be so intriguing.