While many unanswered questions remain, current research is raising many exciting possibilities for studying previously intractable problems. Creation is always a theological doctrine and refers to God giving being to the universe. ID examines features of an already given universe to determine whether those features reliably point to the activity of an intelligent agent or designer. ID is fundamentally a theory of information, though one richer than Shannon's form of it. Specificity refers to objective patterns that information is capable of exhibiting.
Specified complexity is evident in cosmological fine tuning and in biological complexity.
To say that design is empirically detectable is not to say that the activity of a designing intelligence was supernatural or violated any laws of nature. ID does not require miracles, nor does it preclude them. ID is logically consistent both with theistic evolution and with special creation in its various forms. ID is compatible with theism, deism, stoicism, and various forms of Platonism. ID rejects reductionist accounts of intelligence, and it places strict limits on the types of causal accounts capable of explaining specified complexity.