The Design Inference: Why ID Makes Sense

I just saw the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Predictably, the film is creating the anticipated buzz, with liberals panning it as junk science and challenging the movie's premise that there is an institutional attack on the Intelligent Design movement.

Whether there is or is not is immaterial to me. What continues to fascinate me, however, is why the central premise of Intelligent Design--the so-called "Design Inference"--is treated by its detractors as such a radically new proposition.

The inference of design is a given in nearly ever other scientific specialty, when the designer is understood to be human, or at worst, an alien life form (ie, directed panspermia, the idea that aliens seed earth eons ago).

A few weeks ago I watched a program on the History channel that explored an underwater terraced structure. Scientists were debating whether its sharp right angles and neatly layered terraces suggested that the structure was an artificial monument, created by an ancient civilization which had been devastated by a catastrophic deluge which buried the monument in the depths of the oceans. Other scientists claimed that, despite the illusion of design and the precision of the angled joints in the structure, natural forces were sufficient to create the structure.

Is this not a debate on design? Were these not scientists, employing design inferences?

Clearly they were. Yet no hackles were being raised by the National Academy of Sciences because the designers in question were human.

So am I to understand that I am allowed to make design inferences at the macroscopic level, with inanimate objects such as underwater terraced structures, but not with living organisms that are fundamentally "molecular machines" in their own right, infinitely more complex than rocks in the oceans?

Oh consistency, thou art a jewel.

Clearly, with life and the universe, the implications for who or what the designer is are metaphysical or philosophical.

And there lies the rub. Post modern science is strangled by naturalistic assumptions about the universe.

And beyond those assumptions, even angels would fear to tread :)