Design has been considered before and, as I said above, there is no evidence of manipulation in biological organisms.

That doesn’t mean you can’t look for it. The key is to design a scientific method for doing so.

To begin such a process, terms must be very specifically defined. “Information” in the cell is meaningless as a concept, for example, unless you can quantify the units of “information.” Otherwise “information” is an abstract quality just as “beauty” is to art or “robustness” is to a bottle of wine.

The other issues you have raised have all been exhaustively studied in detail and no evidence of design has yet been found.

To get an idea of the vast quantity of research into those areas, it’s helpful to “Google Scholar”
topics such as “Evolution of flagella” “Evolution of sight” amd “origins of life.”

The Google Scholar results demostrate vast amounts of research into these areas. It is not fair to say that some pre-disposition limits the scope of scientific study or that particular areas have been overlooked.

origin of life, information in the cell, the machinery of the flagella, the stasis of the fossil record, the photonics of the eyes

The point is, we have not considered this before, and perhaps we should.

I don’t think the above question is phrased accurately.

“Design” is not unacceptable to science. Limiting the discussion to biology for the moment, there is no evidence for “design.” Every biological feature or process is capable of being explained by natural phenomena operating according to fairly well understood natural laws. Randomness plays some role in the operation of those laws. There is a paucity of evidence that biological systems and features have been designed.

Some quite clearly are designed. Examples include bird’s nests, spider webs, beaver dams and attack submarines. All of these exhibit signs of manipulation of natural objects. There is no evidence of such manipulaiton in either biological systems or solar systems.

But that can change tomorrow. “Design” per se is not excluded. It just hasn’t been observed so far.

My question is actually quite simple. “Design in science” does not require a design inference. It only requires a commitment to “design”. Indeed, as a scientific program, all it requires is a “possibility of design”. Subjectivity is not a criterion to rule out its fruitfulness in science. There are obviously many scientific activities that require subjectivity, things like hunches, design of a hypothesis, judgement in interpretation etc. My question still is, since purpose and some form of “design” is acceptable, why “design in science” is unacceptable? I am questioning the logical link here. Has Darwin ruled out “design”, now and forever? It deserves some answer.

Monod was obviously a clever molecular biologist but his views were classically Darwinian and he believed chance and necessity ruled God out of the equation, as his quotation shows. He felt that the scientific method demanded that no questions for which the answer would have to be God are permitted.

Why should one should accept this arbitrary viewpoint? The founders of the scientific revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries did not. I have much more respect for the mind of the one who formulated Newtonian physics than the one who discovered the lac operon.

Another quote from Monod:

“When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts.” (Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (1972), 138)

In my opinion this attitude is bigotry.

Jacques Monod shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the lac operon. This work played a crucial role in the development of molecular biology and ultimately led to the birth of evo-devo. In 1971, Monod wrote a classic book entitled, Chance and Necessity that made a crucial point:

“Hence it is through reference to our own activity, conscious and projective, intentional and purposive-it is as makers of artifacts-that we judge of a given object’s “naturalness” or “artificialness.””

I think this point is spot on and highlights the fact that a design inference is necessarily subjective. Thus, science cannot accommodate a design inference for, in essence, it is an inquiry that is too big for science. I explain more of this here:

http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/design-and-science/

Of course, if God is the designer, surely He can do whatever He wants, even using chance as His intention. Therefore chance is not a problem for theists. Purpose can also be defended. The issue is why “design” cannot be accepted in science after Darwin. This is the main debatable point. If some form of “design” is acceptable, then why it cannot be acceptable as a scientific program? Why is it that “chance” as a scientific program must win out now and into the future? Why the current dominant theory based on “chance” should be given a pass? That is the main issue.

Begin with a simple question – Did God intend me to exist? I would maintain the Christian answer is ‘yes.’ For example, when Christians have children, we view the birth as a precious gift from God. That birth, like our birth, was not only intended, but part of God’s plan.

Or put it this way. There are three possibilities.

A. There is no God, therefore my existence was not intended.

B. There is a God, yet my existence was not intended.

C. There is a God and my existence was intended.

I adopt position C and I also think this is the mainstream Christian position.

So we need only take the next step and ask a second question.

How did I come into existence? How did we come into existence? We were born. And how did that happen? On one particular day/night, our parents chose to have sexual intercourse and it happened during a time when our mothers’ ovulated one of thousands of possible eggs that, in turn, was fertilized by one of our father’s millions of sperm. We were brought into existence because one particular sperm fertilized one particular egg and it cannot be otherwise. If any other sperm or any other egg was used, we would not exist as who we are. Our existence is dependent on that one sperm and that one egg, each of which underwent its own particular pattern of chromosome recombination during the process of making that one sperm and one egg.

I’m not sure how anyone can escape the fact that chance plays a prominent role in our individual origin, as it was the chance fusion of a particular sperm and particular egg that brought us into existence (for example, we all know there is a 50/50 chance a pregnant woman will have either a boy or girl and whether we are male or female is an intrinsic part of our created identity). The existence of our brothers and sisters testifies to the importance of that particular egg and sperm that brought us into existence.

Once we recognize the central role chance plays, in accord with the divine will of God, in the origin of each and every human being born, I don’t see why suddenly the role of chance, in accord with the divine will of God, is a problem when it comes to the origin of the first humans. Why is one origin issue endlessly debated while a more important origin issue is completely ignored?

(a)” evolution happened and happens…….. For this the evidence is overwhelming.”
Far from being overwhelming, there is no direct evidence for this at all. If you have any, please show me.

(b)”The neo-Darwinian idea….. is essentially correct,….. It is a simple, beautiful, and compelling idea that explains an enormous amount.”
The neo-Darwinian idea cannot be correct. It means that the information in the genome has spontaneously generated, like a book that writes itself or a computer that programs itself. Of course if the idea were true it would explain EVERYTHING. However it is not.

(c) Basically you are saying do not question Darwinism, it unquestionable and it cannot be disputed. You tell others not to question it too because it may be “harmful”. In otherwords for you Darwinism has become dogma.

(d) Yes, I agree, Darwinism leads to racism, eugenics and social engineering which has caused the loss of hundreds of millions of lives in the last century.

(e)”The central point for Christians to keep in view is that human beings have spiritual souls. Whereas physically speaking we are the result of an evolutionary process…..”
Do you believe in resurrection of the body?
If so will there be humans at different stages of evolution in heaven?
That concept makes no sense to me what so ever.