The way I define 'intelligent design' is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.
Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.
There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.
Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.
Deep and elegant explanations relate to natural or social phenomena and the observer often has no place in them.
The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
