Intelligent Design flunked: Denyse O'Leary What exactly is the “design” part of “intelligent design”?

On Uncommon Descent Denyse O’Leary asks a question, every ID creationist should ask, and be able to answer: “What exactly is the “design” part of “intelligent design”?”

For an author of a book on Intelligent Design as well as a ‘teacher’ of a pastoral course on Intelligent Design, Denyse seems to be rather unfamiliar with one of the foundational concepts of Intelligent Design. Well, no fear, PvM is here.

Del Ratzsch wrote:

>Design is the “set theoretic complement of the disjunction regularity-or-chance. “

Or in layman terms design is one or more of the following 1) the empty set 2) ignorance 3) a religious concept founded in the supernatural

Del himself pointed out that

“I do not wish to play down or denigrate what Dembski has done. There is much of value in the Design Ingerence. But I think that some aspects of even the limited task Dembski set for himsel still remain to be tamed.”

and

“That Dembski is not employing the robust, standard, agency-derived conception of design that most of his supporters and many of his critics have assumed seems clear.”

No kidding.

Denyse could also have used the ISCID definition:

Design:

A four-part process by which a designer forms a designed object: (1) A designer conceives a purpose or goal. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) The designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer’s purpose.

But that seems an even worse explanation than the ones she proposes.

Once ID proponents come to realize how flimsy the definition of ‘design’ as proposed by Intelligent Design really is, there will be no more ‘controversy’.