Although I would classify myself as an Intelligent Design Creationist I have found the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID) and its followers to have fallen far short of their promise. Spurned and rejected by the liberal academic community they have fallen into the arms of the North America right-wing with its anti-academic-establishment politics. This polarization toward the right means that the NAID community have painted themselves, a priori, into an anti-evolutionary corner, giving them little choice but to embark on the Quixotic quest to find a basis in physical law which blocks all possibility of evolution being behind the emergence of life over many millions of years. They have so far failed in their quest.......
ONE) They have been misled by dualistic notions of a natural forces vs Divine Creation Intelligent Design dichotomy. In order to maintain the affectation of being a scientific community they are unwilling to identify the Designer as God, an entirely different genus of entity from cosmic "in-house" intelligence (e.g. humans, "aliens" etc.). In-house intelligence, by definition, stays within the cosmic constraints of physical law - but introducing the transcendent intelligence of God changes things considerably - See point 2 below.
The upshot is that the NAIDs appear to have missed the need to address the distinct possibility that those so-called "unguided natural forces" (sic) may well embody divine miraculous provisioning in terms of a suite of physical laws which facilitates the emergence of life over millions of years.
TWO) The error of not distinguishing between in-house intelligence and the transcendent intelligence of God has fed through to their simplistic epistemic filter which doesn't work properly. It also means that NAIDs are pressuring themselves into favouring the idea that even in-house intelligence, such as we see in human beings (and animals like chimps, cats & dogs etc.) has an exotic non-algorithmic basis. Well may be, (although I think probably not, see here and here), but the problem with this is that the NAIDs have started to close down their options and therefore they are going to find difficulty in keeping in their heads two competing hypotheses about the nature of intelligence. That, I tender, is an outcome of the social polarization in the US, where there is pressure to commit to one side or the other of the sharply defined left vs right battle lines between academics and right-wingers.
THREE) Their attempts to use the second law of thermodynamics in its untweaked form as an evolution stopper have failed; even a young earthist guru advises that it not be used for this purpose.
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None of this is to say that evolutionary mechanisms, as conventionally understood, are sufficient to explain the emergence of life over millions of years, particularly abiogenesis, but it is all too obvious to me that the NAID community continue to make heavy weather of their mission: They have become a clique of self-comforting, mutually back-slapping right-wing comrades embattled, persecuted even, by an otherwise hostile academic establishment. It's no surprise they have aligned themselves with other right-wing causes like anti-anthropogenic-climate-change, anti-vax notions, the gun-lobby and an obsession with polarised concepts of sex and gender. Fortunately, I haven't yet seen any evidence that NAIDs are into conspiracy theorism, but that may yet come!
However, I think NAIDs do at least now understand that the second law of thermodynamics, as it is currently formulated, is no to block evolution; after all, the second law only demands an increase in the overall entropy of an isolated system, a system where local decreases in entropy may yet occur. But the NAIDs, spurred on by the possibility that there may be a version of the second-law which can be applied at all levels of a physical system, continue to search for a physical law which bars evolution in all subsystems of a system. Consider this writer on the NAID website "Evolution News"; he dreams of a principle (in fact he thinks it's been found!) which he refers to as the generalized version of the second law......
The traditional Second Law of Thermodynamics is viewed as an inviolable arbiter of possible outcomes for all physical processes. In particular, any conceivable proposal for a perpetual motion machine can, without analysis, be rejected based on the Second Law. With regard to the origin and development of life, the generalized Second Law states that any “alleged natural explanation…will be untrue in the same way a patent examiner in Washington, DC, knows an alleged invention for a perpetual motion machine is untrue.”
Well yes, perhaps the Good Creator has patched-in piecemeal-wise constructive miracles over millions of years thus implementing His grand designs in an ad-hoc fashion ...... and yet because He is the Transcendent, Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator maybe he has miraculously provisioned the physical world with sufficient constraint for the diffusive dynamic in configuration space to settle on those self-perpetuating configurations called life. But NAIDs have barricaded themselves into a corner and have thereby committed themselves to a quest to prove that God's Created world is one of "unguided natural forces" (sic. A phrase used by many NAIDs including the above writer). In their need for mutual moral support in the face of a hostile academic establishment the NAIDs have found solace in a mutual-back-slapping community which blocks any thought of hypothesized evolutionary scenarios, scenarios which even William Dembski has acknowledged are not inconsistent with the core concept of Intelligent Design Creationism. See also here where Dembski says of one his books: Even though argument in this book is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution.”
But the creation, with or without evolution, is clearly not unguided even on the basis of the admission of the NAIDs themselves: After all, they make a lot of cosmic "fine tuning" which (although a necessary condition for evolution it is not a sufficient condition for evolution) constitutes the kind of mathematical constraint that would mean our cosmos cannot be classed as a place of "unguided natural forces" (sic).
NOTES
The NAIDS, along with many young earthists, make the claim that "natural forces" cannot create information. This actually very much depends on how one defines information, but if we are talking about configurational information then this NAID belief is manifestly false. As I have said here and proved here, in parallel computation information (or complexity) is created according to
Ic = Smin + log (Tmin)
Where Ic is the configurational information content, Smin is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration with a minimum number of execution steps of Tmin.
The logarithm of time explains why information is only slowly generated with time and this can give the false impression that those Created "natural forces", when in parallel processing mode, don't create information. However, the NAID thesis manifestly falls over when expanding parallel processing is employed and selection is made with teleological constraints. But this is even true (although less obviously) of today's parallel processing paradigm where useful algorithms generate configurations which are then selected on the basis of teleological search constraints.
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