Intelligent Reasoning

Promoting, advancing and defending Intelligent Design via data, logic and Intelligent Reasoning and exposing the alleged theory of evolution as the nonsense it is. I also educate evotards about ID and the alleged theory of evolution one tard at a time and sometimes in groups

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Explaining the "I" in "ID" - Again

As you should know by now "ID" stands for "Intelligent Design". Therefore the "I" stands for "Intelligent". But why that adjective?

As Wm Dembski writes in Intelligent Design is not Optimal Design:

The confusion centered on what the adjective "intelligent" is doing in the phrase "intelligent design." "Intelligent," after all, can mean nothing more than being the result of an intelligent agent, even one who acts stupidly. On the other hand, it can mean that an intelligent agent acted with skill, mastery, and eclat. Shermer and Prothero understood the "intelligent" in "intelligent design" to mean the latter, and thus presumed that intelligent design must entail optimal design. The intelligent design community, on the other hand, means the former and thus separates intelligent design from questions of optimality.

But why then place the adjective "intelligent" in front of the noun "design"? Doesn't design already include the idea of intelligent agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes an exercise in redundancy? Not at all. Intelligent design needs to be distinguished from apparent design on the one hand and optimal design on the other. Apparent design looks designed but really isn't. Optimal design is perfect design and hence cannot exist except in an idealized realm (sometimes called a "Platonic heaven"). Apparent and optimal design empty design of all practical significance.



"What is intelligence?" My answer is that intelligence is that which can create counterflow. "Counterflow refers to things running contrary to what, in the relevant sense, would (or might) have resulted or occurred had nature operated freely."

Artifacts embody counterflow.

Now even with that clear and concise defintion along with that explanation, there are those who just refuse to understand. They are the same people beholden to sheer dumb luck all the while denying that reality.

"Good night, and good luck..."

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