At Evolution News and Science Today: Can you measure intelligent design?

Well yes, if you are willing to tolerate a positive answer:

The theory of intelligent design employs scientific methods commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Intelligent agency is a cause “now in operation” which can be studied in the world around us. Thus, as a historical science, ID employs the principle of uniformitarianism. It begins with present-day observations of how intelligent agents operate, and then converts those observations into positive predictions of what scientists should expect to find if a natural object arose by intelligent design.

For example, mathematician and philosopher William Dembski observes that “[t]he principal characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice.” According to Dembski, when an intelligent agent acts, “it chooses from a range of competing possibilities” to create some complex and specified event. Thus, the type of information that reliably indicates intelligent design is called “specified complexity” or “complex and specified information,” “CSI” for short.

In brief, something is complex if it’s unlikely, and specified if it matches an independently derived pattern. In using CSI to detect design, Dembski calls ID “a theory of information” where “information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as a proper object for scientific investigation.” ID theorists positively infer design by studying natural objects to determine if they bear the type of information that in our experience arises from an intelligent cause.

Casey Luskin, “Answering an Objection: “You Can’t Measure Intelligent Design”” at Evolution News and Science Today (July 16, 2021)

If you are not willing to tolerate a positive answer, well … your quarrel is not with us, really.

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