LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY bennu_)

Someone posted this in a craigslist forum. I thought it was worth sharing:

"What designed the designer?"
By raising the question of the need for a designer for objects with irreducible complexisty, ID also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" By ID's own arguments, a designer capable of creating irreducible complexity must also be irreducibly complex. Unlike with religious creationism, where the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, this appears to create a logical paradox, as the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely, leaving the question of the creation of the first designer dangling.

One ID counter-argument to this problem invokes an uncaused causer - in other words, a deity - to resolve this problem, in which case ID reduces to religious creationism. At the same time, the postulation of the existence of even a single uncaused causer in the Universe contradicts the fundamental assumption of ID that a designer is needed for every complex object. Another possible counter-argument might be an infinite regression of designers. However, admitting infinite numbers of objects also allows any arbitarily improbable event to occur, such as an object with "irreducible" complexity assembling itself by chance. Again, this contradicts the fundamental assumption of ID that a designer is needed for every complex object, producing a logical contradiction.

Thus, according to opponents, either attempt to patch the ID hypothesis appears to either result in logical contradiction, or reduces it to a belief in religious creationism. ID then ceases to be a falsifiable theory and loses its ability to claim to be a scientific theory.