A lot has been made off the so-called controversy between Creationism and biology.
And ever interested in controversy I have decided to give an example of Intelligent Design.
When I entered the office this morning I noticed a strange construction (I thought), which looked like two rooms with double doors that opened when I pressed a button. The rooms were not immediately obvious to me since the doors failed to open until quite some time after I pressed what looked like the doorbell.
Since my desk is on the sixth floor I decided to press the button with the number 6. This room must be magic of some kind, or a very complex construction/design.
The room moved upwards, following a glass tunnel and the door finally opened again in the sixth floor and I wasn't far from my desk any more.
Through the room's glass walls I could see the atrium of the building as well as the internal balconies of the floors.
It was then obvious to me that both rooms (and the six others that looked like it) had been designed for a specific purpose in mind.
"Intelligent Design" is the idea that we can look at an object and from doing so learn who designed it and why.
In the case of this room, it was obvious that it was designed:
1. All the corners were (rounded) corners and perfectly symmetrical. No random chance incident would produce such a room.
2. The room contained exactly the number of buttons needed (one for each floor, one for alarm, two for door open and close).
3. The glass walls were obviously made so that users of the room could look outwards. (Similarly sized rooms elsewhere in the building have been designed without glass walls so that people cannot look through them.)
4. There was exactly one display in the room, indicating the floor the room currently connected to and an arrow pointing up or down.
No way was that room created by random chance.
The rooms had very obviously been designed and the design had a purpose too. The purpose must have been to transport people from floor to floor.
It occurred to me that in order for my hypothesis to become a theory it would have to be falsifiable. So let's assume that instead of Intelligent Design I believe that evolution created the rooms. Here's a list of things the finding of which would support the idea that evolution rather than Intelligent Design created the rooms:
1. The corners would be rounder and not perfectly symmetrical. (In fact the corners are really perfectly symmetrical. I measured them in two of the rooms.)
2. There would be more or less buttons than needed. Some floors might not have buttons, other buttons would refer to floors that don't exist (and might not do anything useful). The numbers on the buttons would not perfectly represent the floors as if made to represent the floors. The button for floor 3 might not be between the buttons for floors 2 and 4. (In fact all the buttons work and are arranged in order.)
3. The glass in the walls would not be industry standard. (In fact the glass is pretty perfect for the reasonable amount of money a company might spend on such a room's walls.)
4. There would be several displays and only one or two would show useful information with a third or fourth being off or showing random information. (In fact the only display seemed to show only relevant information.)
Obviously evolution didn't create the rooms, some designer did.
Then I thought, perhaps I can learn something about the designer when studying his work? I thought of a few things.
1. Since one room, according to the display outside it, passed by my original floor and didn't stop on its way down or back up, I figured that perhaps the design of the doorbell mechanism is faulty. Further testing revealed that, indeed, the doorbell doesn't work the way it should. From this I figure that the designer is not perfect and makes mistakes.
2. Since the one and only display in the room uses the two arrows (up and down) it can display not to show the direction the room is going to move towards but instead either arrow is displayed more or less randomly, I figure that perhaps the designer didn't know how to fix the arrow problem. He is apparently not all-knowing.
3. Since it takes the room some time to reach the required floor I concluded that the designer wasn't very powerful. (If he was, I thought, why not design a plain old teleporter instead of an unreliable magic room?)
From all this I deduce that the designer of the magic room is a designer who is not perfect, not all-knowing, and not all-powerful; he was indeed, I am sure, a man (or possibly a woman).
At this point the matter seemed to touch the metaphysical and I decided to ask a Catholic friend about it. Perhaps some god had designed it. He said that his god probably didn't design the magic room. I pretty much agreed with him, since the design of the magic room did indicate an imperfect, even stupid (my friend agreed) designer. And why would I insult my friend and claim that his god is an imperfect, even stupid designer?
This has been very interesting and I have decided that I will continue to look at things and figure out if somebody designed them and who the designer might have been.