Intelligent design - fact or fancy?

The noun, design, in the Discovery Institute's brainchild, intelligent design, describes the act of planning and skillfully fashioning material things. Design is modified by the adjective, intelligent, to convey the sense that a high mental capacity is at work. The material world is touted by ID promoters as "irreducibly complex", such that it could have never evolved from primitive states into intricate states. Rather, an intelligent designer, the wondrous supernatural being of the cosmos, created all that exists as is. To refute the scientific theory of evolution, intelligent design advocates claim that the cosmos is too complex to result from natural causes and chance, and that a designer (guess who) must have been involved.

The paragraph above shows that I get the idea of intelligent design. At least, I think I do. What I can't know is whether or not a non-material being preceded material existence, which would be necessary for there to be an intelligent designer. It could be. I just can't tell if it's so. Neither can anyone else. In the material world, factual knowledge of causes other than natural is just not possible. I can never know if an intelligent designer exists or not. I wouldn't bet on ID in the horse race of real discovery that we call science, because ID never arrives at the starting gate.

The concept, chance, is meaningless to the material world, except for humans. The material world doesn't operate by "chance". It is not a natural law, at least as far as I know. Chance is a human explanation for nature's possibilities. To say that something could not have occurred from natural causes belies its very existence. It's nonsense. To say something is improbable is more accurate than to say it could not occur by chance. To say something is improbable, considering the millions and millions of years (a really long time) and the infinite interactions and circumstances available for natural causes to fashion material existence (a whole lot of chances) is more unlikely than to say things have evolved. Under the circumstances, to say anything is "irreducibly complex" is nonsense as well. Saying that all things are capable of unlimited differentiation is equally nonsense. All "irreducibly complex" conveys is that evolution is not fully understood, a human failing, not nature's. Science has challenges, not dead-end ideas.

Let's look now at the concept of design. Symmetry, geometric motifs, functionality, decorativeness, coherence, balance, unity, composition, rhythm and harmony are all elements of design. There are yet other elements of design according to your fancy. The cosmos exhibits design through these enumerated elements and others. Except for humans, no other consciousness of design exists. A molecule has design. A snowflake has design. A diatom has design. A geode has design. Design does not require a designer. To quote Louis J. Halle (Out of Chaos, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1977, p121.):

"The structure of some aggregations (of molecules), their formal design, may give them an advantage in competition (for such molecules) over other aggregations with more imperfect structures. So natural selection would get underway even at this primitive stage, favoring the proliferation of what may become, with time, increasingly harmonious and elaborate designs. The equivalent of the Parthenon may at last emerge, then, from the random collision of atoms and molecules, taking the form of the living cell."

The idea of intelligent design is unworthy of study at any educational level, either as science or philosophy. It's a conundrum. It is not the grist of science. It's self-fulfilling discourse.