“...one can reasonably conclude that neo-Darwinism, far from being contrary to intelligent design, actually implies intelligent design, since the biosphere in the neo-Darwinian account can reasonably be argued to have the properties of an intelligent agent in the sense of Hutter.”
Ah, but isn’t that circular reasoning? The biosphere would have to preexist itself in order to be the intelligent designer of the biological components that make up the biosphere.
No. Because evolutionary biology is about the dynamics of the biosphere. The biosphere certainly, in all naturalistic accounts of the origin of currently extant life-forms, most assuredly preexists life as we know it.
The point of my observation is that it moves the argument from design to a much grander scale — while the eye might be designed by the biosphere functioning as an intelligent agent through the mechanisms suggested by the Darwinian paradigm, much as novel complex computer code optimized for some purpose is designed by a program running autonomously following a Darwinian paradigm,* without new coding by a programmer — the question of the origin of a large complex dynamical system which functions as an intelligent agent (the biosphere) is not addressed by evolutionary biology and is not satisfactorily answered by naturalistic account, any more than the question of the origin of a computer program and digital computer is addressed by Hutter’s theory of intelligent agents modeled by interacting (possibly stochastic, or even quantum) Turing machines.
*Yes, do a search on current work in AI. “Evolved” programs, not coded by anything other than another program that interacts with input are cutting edge. They are also, mistakenly, pointed to by atheist polemicists as “proving” that the argument from design is invalid. This is part of why “mainstream” ID is off base — it’s trying to prove some external designer hand-built molecular machines, when it’s the whole dynamical system that is arguing for design, not the little bits of living stuff it constructs.