Intelligent design: could we do better?

[Angrboda]

As a Taoist, I'm a firm believer in intelligent non-design.



Intelligent design would be fascinating if real, if only to give me a reason to go back into math. However it's not, for some surface reasons, but also deep ones that will likely not go away. The most important of which is the difficulty in determining what one means when one says that something "looks designed" in a way that is rigorous and usefully applicable. Next is that the intuition which powers the argument rests on a faulty and invalid syllogism. Intelligent design, even if true, will need a different logical foundation. And one of its worst issues is that even if you prove design, you still have no real evidence there is a designer behind it. I'm not completely persuaded by Humean skepticism of causality, but if all you've got is tail, you don't know if there's a dog attached to it. Design may demand a designer, but design itself cannot "cause" a designer to be.