To listen to intelligent design (ID) opponents tell it, you’d think that detecting design were a matter of closing your eyes, lifting your arms, and chanting “ooomm”. That it was some dubious subjective inference made in a transcendental state. But folks like that seem not to notice their own behavior. Even such design skeptics, when they walk down a street, easily decide that, say, a flower garden is the result of purposeful design, but that the weeds growing along the road are a matter of serendipity. Even design skeptics, when they first look at Mount Rushmore, or the images on Easter Island, or the Sphinx, immediately know that these are the products of a directing intelligence.
How do they know that? What features of some systems make us even suspect that they might have been purposely designed? Design is “the purposeful arrangement of parts”. Intelligent agents can plan ahead, and act on their plans. They can bring together separate components and place them in relationship to each other, to create an effect that may be extremely unlikely to occur by chance. So we detect design by inferring that some parts appear to have been arranged for a purpose. Any child who plays with Tinkertoys is familiar with making designs, and her Mom can detect many of those designs. Any engineer who plans sophisticated technology is arranging parts for a purpose, and almost anyone who sees the technology and understands how it works can conclude that it was purposely designed.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the detection of design depends on the quantity and quality of evidence. The more parts that appear to be arranged for a purpose, and the more precisely they fit each other to achieve that purpose, the more and more confident we can be in our conclusion of design. For example, if you came across a broken stick on the ground in the woods that pointed toward a campsite, it may be a signal to campers, or it may just be a stick that happened to fall that way. If there were four broken sticks, arranged into an arrow shape pointing at the camp, you’d be fairly confident that that was no accident. If there were a nicely carved arrow on a pole pointing to the camp, inscribed with the words “Camp Bull Moose”, you would be as confident that it was designed as that anything was. Contrary to the assertions of many design opponents, a conclusion of design is based not on some gauzy faith, but on physical evidence and logic.
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