Opponents of ID continue to equate ID theory with supernatural processes and this is just plain wrong. I think part of the problem is that some creationists are using intelligent design as part of their apologetic program for proving that the God of the Bible exists, nevertheless, ID as a theory presupposes neither a supernatural creator nor miracles. ID is a tool used in an investigation that endeavors to determine if some aspects of biotic reality are better explained by reference to a seeing watchmaker rather than a blind watchmaker. A seeing watchmaker need not be a supernatural agent and may be endowed with nothing more than human-like intelligence. Intelligent Design is theologically minimalist. It detects intelligence without speculating about the supernatural. Biochemist Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," physicist David Bohm's "active information," mathematician Marcel Schtzenberger's "functional complexity," and William Dembski's "complex specified information" are alternate routes to the same reality.
It is the empirical detectability of intelligent causes that renders Intelligent Design a fully scientific theory, and distinguishes it from the design arguments of philosophers, or what has traditionally been called "natural theology."
ID looks for patterns of data from life that can best be interpreted as traces of bioengineering. It may not be perfect. It promises no certain knowledge. But it does employ reasonable constraints to generate focus and testable hypotheses. And that is all that matters.
Finally, ID is premised not on a quest for certainty or an attempt to convert all scientists to its methodology. ID is for those whose thinking lies somewhere between those who think the case for design is obvious and true and those who think it is non-existent. ID is for those who don't buy into the notion that we need to show abiogenesis/evolution is impossible before introducing design (as the anti-design folks believe). ID is for those who recognize that if design occurred sometime in the distant past, there would likely be no independent evidence of the designer apart from the properties of the designed thing, which in themselves, are always open to re-interpretation without a designer. ID is for those who seriously *suspect* design for whatever reason.
For instance, I suspect design for many reasons none of which are based on Biblical text. Here are a few: the need to employ teleological concepts and language to understand biology (but not other areas of science); the encoded information in DNA being likened to a software code according to many scientists, the growing appreciation that the cell is far more like a factory of organized molecular machines than a soup; the growing intractability of abiogenesis in light of new knowledge; and the manner in which so much of early life looks front-loaded with information such that its evolution since looks mostly like the shuffling and tinkering of pre-existing endowments. For some people, such reasons may be sufficient to conclude design. For me, such reasons only impart a strong suspicion of design. ID enables one to build on this strong suspicion by looking for the specific traces of design and to use design to generate further coherency.
ID is thus not a generic method to distinguish design from non-design. It is a method that scores things to allow one to either strengthen or weaken their suspicions as regards to the thing in question.
Richard Dawkins begins his book The Blind Watchmaker with the observation that "biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." I agree, therefore I work with the assumption that if something looks designed, it probably is unless there is good reason to think otherwise and if something looks evolved, it probably is unless there is good reason to think otherwise. And the exciting by-product of this approach is the generation of testable hypotheses that have the ability to increase general knowledge about the world. Knowledge that we could never find using a methodology that rejects design. But in the anti-ID'ers perceptual field, things that look evolved and things that look designed are all the products of evolution. Period. Of course they are going to complain about ID.
As I see it, something that exhibits machine-like complexity is likely to be the product of design unless there is good reason to think otherwise. This is because we know of thousands of machines whose origin is *known* to be from design.
Since opening the black box of the cell, many things have turned out to look strangely machine-like. So machine-like, I view them as literal machines and there is no good argument against this perception. This, of course, is to be expected from a design event and design proponents have a long history of likening living things to machines. This was also NOT expected from the viewpoint that excluded design, as has been documented with the observations of leading scientific figures. More importantly, however, is that this ID/machine paradigm is a fruitful guide to research.
Now the common objection to this is that human artifacts are not biological or biochemical systems. But those that make this objection must be unaware of all the biotechnology that has arisen on this planet in the last few decades.
I think the biological machines that make up the core of life are sufficiently analogous to man-made machines to make an ID inference. We know they are at least analogous enough that the president of the National Academy of Sciences (Bruce Alberts) has proposed that biologists begin to learn from engineers to understand biology. I therefore, see no problem with treating life as carbon-based nanotechnology.
