These posts about an "intelligent designer" vs. "intelligent design" bring
up the issue of whether it even makes sense to talk about intelligent
design without some specification of what the intelligent designer
might be.
It appears to me that going about things this way is another example of the
Platonic/Rationalistic approach, in which a concept (like that of design)
is defined in a way divorced from its logically necessary objective basis
(designers) and then applied to "logically" yield a pre-defined result (the
existence of whichever designer the intelligent designer happens to have a
prior belief in).
There is, of course, no such thing as intelligent design without an
intelligent designer, and the nature of the specific nature of the design
process and the results depends on the designer, so it would seem that the
approach that the ID crowd is (mostly) taking is either inverted or
invalidated by their attempt to have a concept of intelligent design that
does not directly involve a concept of the nature of the intelligent designer.
Therefore, to clear this up, I'd like to see a kind of statement of the
"program" of folks like Jones as to how they expect to justify a concept of
intelligent design (or even just design) that is isolated from types of
designer (such as naturalistic (aliens, humans, animals, machines) and
supernaturalistic (demi-gods, ghosts, and "God")).
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