Dennis is doing his best to position himself in the third column, by responding to both the Atheist and the Theist with some sort of non-theist position.*

So how does Dennis dismiss the question about designers? By reformulating it to be a question about time.

According to the Big Bang theory, at up to 1 x 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe expanded and began cooling from the Planck epoch. Gravitation began to separate from the fundamental gauge interactions: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang. The question is, WHAT EXISTED AT TIME = ZERO, just 1 x 10^-43 of a second before? The answer to this question is the answer as to why ID Theory does not require a designer.

And the answer is:

The reason why no matter or deity is required at Time = zero is because according to quantum mechanics and atomic physics, atomic particles zip in and out of existence from dimensions outside our universe. The same is the case for the origin of information that ID Theory studies, http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-scientists-erase-energy.html.

Dennis' answer as to why we don't need to worry about the Creator of time, is that these things exist before time, outside our universe. We're right back to Democritus and the eternal existence of stuff that don't need no stinkin' creator. ("Big Bang? What Big Bang? That's just a firecracker in the ultimate mega-multiverse.")

So Dennis doesn't want to be called either a theist or an atheist, he wants to admit the arguments of ID without admitting any further claims of theology. And this is not a bad thing, for this is also the claim of Discovery Institute as well as many ID defenders at the Dover trial. However Dennis takes one baby step further, a step that drops him into the maelstrom--he wants to show how materialism can either eliminate the designer or make the designer non-personal, which is sometimes called "chance" but which I prefer to call it "Chaos".

And in reifying the Democritean Xaos, Dennis has shown his poker hand--he's a crypto-materialist. Which is often true of people who call themselves agnostics--they're just atheists in denial--which is something they cannot know.

It is without a doubt distasteful to overhear another's intervention, so I will refrain from trying to convince Dennis that he needs to get to an atheist retreat center and do some serious meditating on the meaninglessness of life, and we'll just accept his claim that this QM/Multiverse/Information replaces whatever it is that the personal God of theism does. So our question becomes, "Does it work?"

"Wait a minute!" you may object, "How does Dennis' position differ from the Discovery Institute's position? Am I saying that ignoring the nature of the designer doesn't work?"

Unlike the Discovery Institute, Dennis gives a "scientific" explanation for an impersonal designer. The Discovery Institute, as well as most defenders of ID, argue that the nature of the designer is a metaphysical question, and willingly restrict their development of ID to scientific questions out of a respect for metaphysics. That is, your metaphysical description of the designer may be different than mine, but this should not prevent us from discussing scientific predictions of the world we both observe. If, however, I insist that your metaphysical description can be evaluated by my science, then I have moved the boundary stones, I have infringed on your metaphysical turf. Where science ends and where metaphysics begins is a very contentious boundary related to the demarcation problem, but we can put a demilitarized zone around it, and forbid trespassing into "the nature of the designer inferred from design". And this is precisely where Dennis has gone--into the minefield.

Now I'm of the personal opinion that this demarcation problem will turn out to be a hot topic after this pesky Darwinist controversy dies down, but in the meantime, we have to drive a stake through this materialist zombie that keeps staggering around the DMZ setting off explosions. So let's look at what Dennis takes as materialist evidence for the creator-god Xaos, and see if it does what he says.

A problem of time
Dennis says that particles (Democritus would have said atoms), "zip in and out of existence". Now we have a problem: to "come into existence" is to say there is a special time before which something did not exist, but after which it did. This statement makes no sense when applied to time itself. That is, time must exist before anything else can "come into existence". So Dennis must assume that time is eternal in order to prove that the Big Bang is normal. But the Big Bang is not just the "coming into existence" of matter, but of time as well. Thus Dennis has solved his problem (what came before the Big Bang) by assuming it (eternal time), which of course, denies the reality of the Big Bang as a beginning of time.

Nutshell argument: The Big Bang isn't a problem because it doesn't Bang.

A problem of space
Dennis says that the creation of matter in the Big Bang isn't a problem because it came from somewhere else. But the Big Bang was the creation of space itself, so where is this "somewhere else"? Dennis says, "dimensions outside our universe", which is easy to say, but what does it mean? Dimensions of what? What is the nature of this "higher dimensional space"? Is it real? Is it material? Is it mathematical? Is it logical?

It is one thing to say that the world we live in is "all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be" because at least we have an idea of what we're talking about, but what does it mean to say that the eternal reality is "dimensions outside our universe"? Isn't that completely unbounded, so for example it could be a simulation on a computer like "The Matrix", or a demon, or a thought in the mind of God? Even the inventors of the "landscape theory", Lee Smolin himself, has trouble with this timeless landcape.

Nutshell argument: The Big Bang isn't a problem because it isn't Big.

A problem of information
A slightly more esoteric problem with the Big Bang, is that really hot explosions rarely make cool machines--like people. The laws of entropy would suggest that heat is really bad for information, and really hot stuff can't cool unless something else absorbs the entropy. Or we can say it the other way, information is the inverse of entropy, and where is the information hiding in the Big Bang?

Some physicists have argued that the information is hiding in the gravitational field, so as the universe expanded it cooled and the galaxies just sort of condensed information out of the gravitational field--or something, it's always been a rabbit pulled out of the hat. And the rabbit Dennis favors is QM information. (Cue the violins.)

Well does wrapping a mystery in an enigma solve the problem? Dennis gives us some links, the one at the end of the quote above with a graphic he reuses, has this caption "The source of intelligent design information might be from outside our universe."

I interpret this to mean that he thinks the ID doesn't have to come from a designer but from a non-personal material source external to the Big Bang. Unfortunately, the linked article has nothing to say about the source of information, rather, it is all about the hoary 150-year-old thermodynamics problem known as Maxwell's Demon which purports to show how entropy can be reversed (think perpetual motion machines) if we just knew enough information. The 1960 Landauer solution, said that information costs energy, so in fact, entropy can't be reversed when we take into account the energetic cost of information. This recent QM theory paper suggests that one source of information can be traded for another without costing any energy, so we might potentially avoid the energy lost to Maxwell's Demon if we can find a big enough reservoir of information (QM or otherwise).

And Dennis thinks this big reservoir is just sitting there outside our universe waiting for someone to hook up the QM spigot. We have all the same "outside of what?" questions we asked earlier, but now we have to ask "How can you tell that this reservoir of outside info isn't a person, especially when it shows all the characteristics we associate with intelligent agents?

Nutshell argument: ID doesn't need a Designer for the universe because somebody else can pipe in the information.