Dembski emphasizes that in attributing an event to design, he is not characterizing it as a product of intelligence. For he defines “design” to mean “neither regularity nor chance,” that is to say, if something is not explicable in terms of natural law or chance, then by definition it is due to “design.” To say that something is due to “design” is just to say that it exhibits a certain kind of pattern. Nevertheless, Dembski thinks that proving that something is due to neither regularity nor chance is the logical prerequisite for proving that it is due to intelligence. He makes the move from “design” to a bona fide designer or intelligent agent by means of a threestep schema of actualizationexclusionspecification; that is to say, one finds that a certain possibility has been actualized (and therefore presumably requires a cause), one excludes accounts of the event based on natural law explanations (thereby showing that the event is physically contingent), and finally one specifies that contingency so as to show that it conforms to an independently given pattern (thereby distinguishing choice from mere chance as the cause of the event). Since the hallmark of intelligent agency is choice, one has thus shown that the best explanation for the occurrence of the event is an intelligent agent. Obviously, this threestep schema simply retraces the steps of Dembski’s design inference, so that it turns out that one is getting to genuine design (a previsioned product of intelligent agency) after all. Thus, if the initial conditions of the universe are due to “design,” as argued above, then the inference to a Cosmic Designer is warranted.
