By Aaron Sherman
Intelligent Design (ID) was, as I've covered here before, more or less a political effort to disguise a Christian, Young Earth Creationist document as a pseudo-scientific premise. It was so poorly constructed that, in court, evidence was presented from a word processor document that showed that the cornerstone of ID was, in fact, just a Christian Creationism document that had been edited to say "Intelligent Design" instead of "Creationism". But there's a problem. The idea of intelligent design predates the terrible and hackish attempt by a small group of American Christians to re-invent it. Thomas Aquinas's 5th way of demonstrating the existence of God was essentially Intelligent Design, and more broadly, there were many empiricists of the 17th and 18th century who worked on this idea as well, including Hume and Locke.
Bowler, in his book, Evolution: The History of an Idea makes it clear that as early as the 1860s, people were struggling with this idea with respect to evolution, and felt that the complexity and diversity of what we actually see in nature must imply the existence of a creator, and that that idea was not antithetical to the evidence of our senses combined with the power of reason (i.e. science). Whether you agree or disagree with that premise, it seems a worthy thing to come up with a term that we can use to refer to this concept.
More or less, the term for this class of idea is a teleological argument. However, that term narrowly refers to an a posteriori argument for the existence of God. I'm looking for a term which more broadly asserts the fundamental concept of intelligence in the act of creation.
This is my attempt to do so. Let's look at what we need to define and then we'll get to the definition.
