Intelligent Design (ID)

Bein' a YEC an' all, I don't entirely agree with the approach of the ID movement, but in its defense, I also have to disagree that it's unscientific.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project was astronomer Carl Sagan's baby and he was definitely atheist.  Can we see how the criteria SETI is using to identify intelligent signals from unintelligent ones are the same criteria used by ID on DNA information coding?  There is no disputing that DNA qualifies as information code (approximately 20-base digital), and nowhere in human experience has information formed spontaneously, without intelligent agency.

Francis Crick, of Nobel Prize fame for DNA molecule structure discovery, looked for a way that the nature of the nucleotide chemistry might naturally order the base-pair sequence, but no dice.  Just as the Scrabble letter tiles have no magnetic strips that form them into words when dumped on the table, DNA has no self-ordering mechanism internal to its nucleotide chemistry - it is simply-code building blocks with information imposed upon it.  God's signature on every cell.

Is this the one case where we want to invoke an exception to information theory, in order to avoid the larger implications?  Another alternative, suggested by Crick (and more recently by Dawkins) is panspermia (seeding of Earth with life by aliens), but you can predict the next question.  It only defers the problem.

ID however, is pursuing the science of establishing and using criteria for distinguishing intelligent design from random occurrence.  Looking at the two images in this post, we can easily discern which of the two was intelligently designed and which likely occurred randomly.  Why are we able to do so?  What qualificaiton criteria are we using?  Is it inductive reasoning from the large scope of human experience?  If it were common for wind and rain erosion to carve detailed human-face shapes in rock, would things be different?