An ID Oops

I was doing some reading on the Intelligent Design page for a lesson I'm giving on Tuesday about teleological arguments for the existence of God, and there seems to be a logical fallacy in part of what they say:

Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI [complex and specified information]. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

Hopefully I'll be using all the logic symbols correctly. I'm not doing anything very complicated here, but I haven't done much with them since a one-week mini unit in geometry my freshman year of high school.

Let's break down their hypothesis: "if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI"

A = a natural object is designed
B = the object contains complex and specified information

A -> B

That part seems fair enough. At second glance, I objected to this, but at third glance I took into account the specific words used, and it worked once more. Note that it specifies design, not just creation. Design implies that there is a purpose behind the pieces. Heather is an intelligent being, but not everything she creates contains what I would call complex and specified information. On the other hand, when she purposefully designs something, CSI is present in some form or another, bizarre though it may be.

But what they say next doesn't work: "When ID researchers find irreducible complexity [an example of CSI] in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed"

B, therefore A
(I don't know how to do the dot triangle symbol for therefore)

This statement does not follow logically from the first statement. There is a fallacy lurking here.


Does this mean that the ID theory is bunk? I think not, but I do think that the website's writer needs to re-word his hypothesis. Yes, I'm being picky here, but I reckon I should be as picky as I can be, since the ID critics certainly are. Here are some possibilities that I think would work better:

Alternative Hypothesis 1: If an object contains high levels of CSI, it must be designed.
Here, we merely switch A and B from their first proposition.

A = an object contains high levels of CSI
B = an object is designed
A -> B

We know of natural objects that contain high levels of CSI, so we can assume they are designed.

A, therefore B

This is a logically sound proposition.

Alternative Hypothesis 2: Objects created by undirected processes (such as random mutation) do not exhibit high levels of CSI.

A = an object is created by an undirected process
B = an object does not exhibit high levels of CSI
A -> B

This time, we know of many natural objects for which B is not true.

~B, therefore ~A

This is also logically sound.

However, both of these hypotheses issue a new challenge outside of this sort of logic: proponents of ID must support the premises of the hypothesis/hypotheses. We know that there are naturally-existing objects that exhibit CSI (DNA, cells, etc.). However, they must also support that these cannot or do not arise from undirected processes. Fortunately, it's easy to support this empirically. If we take any object with CSI whose origin we know, such as a machine, blueprint, book, or piece of art (except maybe for some modern and postmodern art), we know that it was brought into being by design - something intelligent purposefully assembled it.

Now we have two possible hypothesis that are empirically supported, and both point to an Intelligent Designer to explain the complex and specified information we see in the world around us.