In the article I quoted yesterday, the author refers to "The Wedge Document" (see a summary here), a document drafted by the Discovery Institute to explain its long-term strategy for debunking materialism (the idea that the physical world is all that exists).  The document opens with this paragraph:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

The document then goes on to detail the corrosive effects that materialism (specifically, the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Freud) has had on our society, concluding with the worst:

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Ideas have consequences.  False ideas have bad consequences.  The idea that God does not exist has the worst consequences of all.  Atheism has killed over 100 million people.  There is simply no ground for human rights if God does not exist.  There is nothing to check the power of a government if the government considers itself the supreme power.  And without a standard of right and wrong, the only thing determining right and wrong is power--whoever has the power is right.

But I'm not just advocating intelligent design because I think it will make a better society--I think it is true and materialism is false.  Considering the consequences, if materialism is false, we cannot stand by and let it grow unchallenged.  There's just too much at stake here.

A friend just sent me an article from the May 30, 2005 issue of The New Yorker titled "Devolution:  Why intelligent design isn't."  Despite the fact that the author, H. Allen Orr, calls intelligent design "junk science" and claims that the hype over the movement (and William Dembski's work in particular) only exists "because an innumerate public is easily impressed by a bit of mathematics," he actually gives a decent, quick summary of specified complexity as an argument for intelligent design .  He says:

According to Dembski, a complex object must be the result of intelligence if it was the product neither of chance nor of necessity.  The novel "Moby Dick," for example, didn't arise by chance (Melville didn't scribble random letters), and it wasn't the necessary consequence of a physical law (unlike, say, the fall of an apple).  It was, instead, the result of Melville's intelligence.  Dembski argues that there is a reliable way to recognize such products of intelligence in the natural world.  We can conclude that an object was intelligently designed, he says, if it shows "specified complexity"--complexity that matches an "independently given pattern."  The sequence of letters "JKXVCJUDOPLVM" is certainly complex: if you randomly type thirteen letters, you are very unlikely to arrive at this particular sequence.  But it isn't specified it doesn't match any independently given sequence of letters.  If, on the other hand, I ask you for the first sentence of "Moby Dick" and you type the letters "CALLMEISHMAEL," you have produced something that is both complex and specified.  The sequence you typed is unlikely to arise by chance alone, and it matches an independent target sequence (the one written by Melville).  Dembski argues that specified complexity, when expressed mathematically, provides an unmistakable signature of intelligence.  Things like "CALLMEISHMAEL," he points out, just don't arise in the real world without acts of intelligence.

The words of Melville's novel, like the DNA in the cells of our body:

1. Did not (and could not) come together randomly by chance.
2. Did not come together out of necessity (i.e., the physical laws of the universe did not determine their arrangement).
3. The pattern that emerged is complex (i.e., it is not a simple pattern like ABABAB).
4. The pattern that did come together communicates meaningful information.
5. In our experience of the world, specified complexity occurs only as a result of the work of an intelligent agent, so we can reasonably conclude that this case (DNA and all of life) is no different.

Take a look at this article and the brief arguments the author offers against the claims of Dembski and others.  Even though Orr is clearly against the I.D. movement, this is the first time I've seen the press explain and address the actual arguments, and that's a step in the right direction.