Nosyned writes:
It merely states that whatever the ID is it must be more complex than that which it designs.
I don't see that this holds. We have examples of design by very unintelligent things. Maybe (I'm not sure) they are less complex than the design output.
The argument about the complexity of the designer comes from ID reasoning itself. ID-ists reason that life is too complex to have arisen "by pure chance", as they often put it. It is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligence. It is the level of complexity that prompts them to say this. Critics of this line of reasoning have two venues to attack it.
First, there is the question of how to measure complexity. ID-ists notoriously neglect to define and/or quantify complexity. And if they do define it, they usually end up conflating Shannon entropy with thermodynamic entropy, en passant misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics.
Second, their reasoning that if something is too complex to have arisen naturally, it must have been designed by an intelligence, backfires on them. Humans are too complex to have arisen naturally, the reasoning goes. Yet, the critics may observe, humans are not intelligent enough to create life. So an intelligence that is capable of creating life is surely more complex then humans, and must therefore itself be too complex to have arisen naturally. So the critics ask the ID-ists: who created the creator? And who created the creator's creator? And so on.
It's not that the critics themselves think that this ID reasoning holds, but that if ID-ists want to use it, they have to realise that it isn't a satisfactory explanation, because it raises an infinite regress of ever more unexplained complex beings.
Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.