Natwerk Designs

What is the difference Between St. Thomas' explanation of intelligent design & the Modern explanation of it?

We were discussing St. Thomas Aquinas' Intelligent Design and someone made a comment because they didn't understand the difference between modern intelligent design and St. Thomas'. We explained what each was, but really couldn't get to what each of them focused on. What we have so far is that Aquinas' is Philosophical and Theological about the world rather than scientifically and of the worldly focus as does the modern intelligent design. Are we not correct? What are we missing? Not understanding?

Public Comments

1. Aquinas' argument was teleological -- that's a Greek word meaning 'purpose'. The inference is that both order and functional forms imply a purpose, and the reason everything fits together so well is that everything was made to fit with everything else. The inference is flawed. We know from work in artificial intelligence that random processes can and do produce an appearance of patterned order. And from chaos theory we also know that strictly deterministic processes can and do produce an appearance of randomness. Besides that, we can observe adaptation in action -- why would organisms be forced into 'change' if they already served a purpose? The usual modern argument for intelligent design is different. Instead of saying "so much order and so many functional forms implies planning towards some purpose," most modern arguments are from complexity -- they assert that complex systems can't be accidental; or if using scientific terms, that to increase order by random process violates entropy.