Intelligent design tends to be overly simplified in what discussions you see in scientific circles. It is frequently derided as a God of the gaps argument despite the fact that it is much more than such a simple argument. The argument can be made that evolutionists are actually making a naturalism of the gaps argument. There are many secrets to intelligent design that are not found in most presentations about it, because the person doing the presentation doesn't want to give it any credibility and in fact is trying to do the exact opposite. Let us look at several secrets of intelligent design that you frequently do not get.
The need for pure forms of molecules is a problem for naturalistic abiogenesis that has only been overcome by the activity of intelligent agency. That is human beings have produced systems for producing these molecules in pure forms, but when doing so under natural conditions the results are anything but pure. While conceivably you could argue that the necessary purity occurred by chance, the odds of this occurring are just one of many extremely improbable steps that would be necessary for abiogenesis to occur. This is one of the many issues that points strongly to an intelligent designer. In this case the only case we know of getting the needed purity outside a living cell requires the action of intelligence.
The probability of getting the necessary components for a cell exceeds the number of possible events in the history of the universe by tens of thousands of orders of magnitude. You understand that this just includes getting the right components together in the same place and time. It does not include the probability of actually assembling the cell. The response to this is often that there is some sort of selection process. However, this would require some sort of self-replicating system of which only living cells are an example. No system for producing the right components necessary to produce even a minimalistic living cell has ever been proposed. Certainly nothing that actually demonstrates a way of reducing the odds. The only way of reducing the odds that have been successfully proposed is by simplifying the cell to reduce the number of components that are necessary. The problem with this approach is that it is way less than the minimum required for even a minimalistic living cell.
Now let's say you did managed to get all of the components necessary to produce a living cell in close enough proximity that the attempt could actually be made. However, the number of possible combinations by which the components can interact are known for a simple yeast cell to be(1) 1079,000,000,000 which makes the problem worse by over a million orders of magnitude. Consequently, even if you could get all of the necessary components in the same place in time necessary to produce a living cell the odds of getting the interactions right to produce an actual living cell would be so astronomically small as to be completely laughable that anybody actually believed that a Biogenesis is possible with what we now know about living cells.
A God of the gaps argument would be simply a case where you conclude that God did it without giving any reasons for drawing that conclusion other than lack of knowledge. For example, if your entire argument is that God is responsible for something because we don't know how it could have been done by natural processes then that is a God of the gaps argument. This is not a legitimate way of bringing God into the discussion, however both creationists and intelligent design proponents are frequently accused of doing so. Primarily this is because, evolutionists in general and specifically atheists want to keep God out of the picture as much as possible. Even if they claim to believe in God, if they are engaging in these discussions as an evolutionist, they really don't want got in the picture regardless of what they believe about his existence.
intelligent design is not a God of the gaps argument despite the fact that its ultimate conclusion involves God, because it does not simply jump to the conclusion that God is the answer. With Intelligent design, science first demonstrates that the construction of living cells is far too complex and too improbable to have any chance of being the result of natural processes. No model for the origin or subsequent history of life on earth has actually successfully demonstrated being able to produce what we observe, it simply assumes that mutations in natural selection are capable of doing the job. It is then demonstrated that the only phenomenon that we know of that can overcome this problem is an intelligent designer. Ultimately, it can be demonstrated that the only candidate for this designer would be God.
A common tactic used by evolutionists and particularly atheists is that you cannot infer a designer without evidence of their existence from some other source. First of all, the fact that God has mentioned in the Bible fits all the qualifications of the designer necessary for creating life here on earth meets the qualification of being such outside evidence. Naturally evolutionists in general and atheists in particular reject the Bible as evidence of anything let alone the existence of God. However, the need for an intelligent designer is in and of itself evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer. For example, if we found some form of alien artifact that gave every evidence of being designed that would be considered sufficient evidence for the existence of an alien race even if we knew nothing else about them.
There are plenty of examples of inferring intelligence outside biology. In fact, it is very common within archaeology. Let's say you were in the middle of a jungle where there were no people and you stumbled across a building or even an entire village, without any other evidence that people ever lived in the area. In such a case archaeologists would conclude that this area was once inhabited. In this case this simple evidence of designed structures would be sufficient evidence that the people who built the structures once lived there, even if there was absolutely no other evidence of who they were or that they ever existed.
Abiogenesis cannot explain the origin of life because of a whole bunch of reasons. They include the fact that the odds of getting the molecules that you need to produce a living cell at the necessary levels of purity are astronomically small. It gets even worse when you look at the odds of assembling a living cell. If by some miracle you got the right components it would take a miracle a million times larger to get them assembled right into a living cell. The notion that abiogenesis is even remotely possible is really a joke and the only reasons anybody would actually believe it is that they were taught to blindly accept the idea, and they never question it, or they desperately want any explanation other than God.
Intelligent design actually does explain the origin of life because intelligent designers can organize things any way they want, within their ability to manipulate what they are working on. Now in the case of God this ability would be infinite so there is no problem with him being able to organize matter at the level necessary to produce living cells. Even aliens would probably have a degree of difficulty working on this level because you are starting to run into quantum effects which would be problematic.
The ultimate secret of intelligent design is that God as the intelligent designer of life and ultimately the entire universe is the only real rational explanation. The only real reason for looking at it from any other perspective is a desire to exclude God as a possibility. Once God is allowed as an explanation nothing else makes any sense.
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(1) Peter Tampa and George D rose, Protein Science 2011 2074-2079, Department of structural biology, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, and the Department of Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD
