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For analagous example, even though I might lack exhaustive knowledge of the ultimate purpose of the designer and sculptor of Mount Rushmore, that subjective inscrutablity does not preclude the immediate defeasible inference that the work was the product of intelligence, as opposed to wind erosion.

Ah. But can you do that for any arbitrary case?

There was another poster not too many months ago, who posited much the same thing as you do here, but he turned out to be unwilling to play the "design inference game" - would you like to play? It's very simple - I'll post pictures of various objects and artifacts, one at a time, and for each one, you infer whether or not it was designed (or, "the product of intelligence", if you like), and then defend that inference as best you can.

Ready to play? ;)

Seeing as how it's you, general, how could I resist?'^)

A couple of provisos, though.

First, I need to know the rules of the 'game'. Here are my proposals:

a)Whenever design is inferred three things must be established:

1. Contingency (an event is one of several possiblities, ensuring that the object is not the result of of a natural law, or an automatic, and hence unintelligent processes.
2. Complexity (the object is not so simple that it can readily be explained by chance)
3. Specification (a match between an event and an independently given pattern)

It must be stipulated that specified complexity is a reliable criterion for DETECTING design, not a reliable criterion for ELIMINATING design, because design has the ability to mimic unintelligent causes. Consequently, things that are designed will occasionally slip past the net. But whenever the above criterion attribute design, design actually is present.

No probability amplifiers or attenuators; ie, algorithms that skew probabilties with teleological target sequences that can give the appearance of complexity, but which in actuality cannot generate it.

The above being stipulated, I would also like to have an EVOLUTIONARY INFERENCE TEST in which I posit pictures of irreducibly complex biological machines and you have to deduce and defend how such a thing could have come about without a designer - and the big rule here is that you have to explain how the irreducibly complex machine was helpful to the creature before it became what it is now. (WHY play your 'game' if you won't play mine?;^)

In all honesty, though, I don't regard any of this as a game. What we are involved in eternal life and eternal death - and that my fundamental purpose is to defend the faith I have in a Creator not only who designed things well in the beginning when they were fresh from His creative mind, but also the notion that what things are is not what they once were ("devolution", if you will) especially regarding human nature being a rebel nature against the very DESIGNER Whose work we are discussing. Thus you should know that Scripture regards us in our natural condition as rebels without a cause except our own egoistic rebellion against the Creator. My goal is to show you that your arguments against design are not just unscientific, but at heart an effort to avoid responsibility to the One who designed you.

Cordially,