Pim Van Meurs on the Design Inference

Pim Van Meurs has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb that looks at Dembski's design inference and why it is really nothing more than a "god of the gaps" argument, contrary to the common claims of ID proponents that there is a positive way to detect design:

Okay, let's start with how ID tries to infer design, namely by using the Design Inference. In order for something to be designed, it needs to be 'specified' and sufficiently 'complex'. So what is really meant by these terms? Specification basically means that there exists an independent description of the event or system, and as Dembski points out in biology 'specification' is trivially met by function. So what about 'complexity'? Unlike the more common meaning of the term, complexity in ID speak refers to something which cannot (yet) be explained by regularity and/or chance. When these requirements are met, a design inference is triggered. In other words, a design inference bascially states that something functional whose origin we do not (yet) understand and is thus specified and complex, is also 'designed'. Or to use Del Ratzsch's description: Design is the "set theoretic complement of the disjunction regularity-or-chance. ". This clearly qualifiies as an argument from ignorance, also known as a 'gap argument'.

Dead on. The same is true of Behe's concept of irreducible complexity (IC), an argument that requires as its first premise the presumption that complex biochemical systems with multiple interacting parts that are each required to function cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Both IC and Dembski's CSI take essentially the same form - "not evolution, therefore God" (and no, I'm not going to say "therefore the unnamed intelligent designer" - they don't mean anything but God by it and I'm not going to let them play pretend without calling them on it). It is a purely negative argument.