Intelligent Design: Some Parts of Creation Are Designed, Others Are Not?

[John Bauer]

Whereas traditional design arguments perceive the whole universe to be designed by God, ID proponents argue that certain components of the world around us are designed whereas others are not. … Dembski suggests that "there has to be a reliable way to distinguish between events or objects that result from purely natural causes and events or objects whose emergence additionally requires the help of a designing intelligence … The whole point of the design inference is to draw such a distinction between natural and intelligent causes." … ID therefore envisages that there are two types of explanation for biological phenomena: the "naturalistic explanations" that are represented by our current scientific knowledge, and "design explanations" which depend on "intelligent causes." … The sharp division between the "natural forces" and the actions of the "designer" in the ID literature has overtones of a deistic view in which "nature" is presented as being quasi-autonomous, whereas the actions of the intelligent designer are restricted to a rather limited repertoire of events in the patch-work quilt. … Dembski refers approvingly to Aristotle's idea that design completes "what nature cannot bring to a finish"—but the Bible simply knows of no such dualism between "design" and "nature," speaking only of a single created order. As Augustine succinctly put the point back in the fifth century: "Nature is what God does."

Denis R. Alexander, "Is Intelligent Design Biblical?" (ca. 2005) [PDF link] (hosted by the Christians in Science web site). All emphases mine.

 

[Josheb]

One of the most fundamental strengths of the Judeo-Christian, or Bible-based, view of creation is that it explains both order and any real or perceived lack thereof. That used to be worded to say order and chaos, but we know chaos is just a lack of math skills. If we understood all the predicate conditions, all the temporal causative events, and the nature of any given moment then we'd find there was, in fact, impeccable order. That does not mean God is meticulous, however. God can trust in His ability. If He throws a ball with the intention of having that ball land on a specific spot in this singularity, then He knows the goal will occur because He has created every single condition of that ball's path all the way down to the quantum state. There will be no unplanned gust of wind, not fluctuation in temperature, no gnat flying into the ball along its pathway that can cause any unplanned deviation in the ball's path because all such incidents and their lack thereof was ordered by God from eternity. That does not mean He physically carried the ball to its destination. That would be contradictory to His throw.