Design without creation? Sure.

The Darwin lobby insists that design in nature must mean "creationism", which is currently as popular among Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors as any kind of actual dissent from their easily falsified nostrums.

Philosopher of science Del Ratzsch, whose work first inspired me to write By Design or by Chance?, offers an example of design without creation, where origin of life is concerned:

For instance, suppose that we finally discover that life can arise spontaneously but only under exactly one set of conditions. One must begin with 4003.6 gallons of eight specific, absolutely pure chemicals, exactly proportioned down to the molecule. The mixture must then be sealed into a large, light green Tupperware container with one sterile copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Do that, and life develops spontaneously by natural means (catalyzed by the precise surface characteristics of "Sgt. Pepper"). Its development, subsequent reproductions and characteristics are completely according to normal natural laws. And life in this case was not directly specially created. But those initial conditions involve interjection of deliberate intent and design with a vengeance." (Ratzsch D., "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," in Dembski W.A., ed., Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, p. 291)

Now, a dullard might object that Del's is an unlikely recipe for life; his point is, of course, that a recipe is design using existing ingredients, not creation ex nihilo of the ingredients along with the design.

Intelligent design theorists are harassed, in my view, for the precise reason that the origin of life really is best attributed to design, not law or chance, as Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) affirms.

The law and chance people know well that that is what it looks like, and are constantly advising the rest of us not to trust our lyin' eyes.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Touchstone: My "Glorious Wild Things" essay now on line

My Touchstone piece is here (scroll down):

We will never understand creation if we insist on separating glory and design from suffering, loss, and waste, because, bound in finite time and space, creation is full of suffering, loss, and waste as well. All must be taken together or put aside together, in a final decision for meaning or nihilism.
The modern debate has decayed in part because that vision of the inseparability of the horror from the glory has been lost. Of course, Stephen Jay Gould was merely being tendentious when he dismissed our deep-seated fears of monsters as commercial hype. As a paleontologist, he well knew that, before humans ever walked the earth, there were terrible beasts on land and sea—far more so than today.

But his evolutionary-psychologist opponents are even more off the track. Any human who is gifted with the mere capacity to imagine fears the serpent’s sudden fang and the ghost’s spectral finger. That’s simply what imagination is; it bodies forth the shape of things unknown. Imagination, not some complex survival calculus, is our true inheritance from our ancestors.

Thinkquote of the day: Mike S. Adams

Mike S. Adams, a prof who boldly attacks the stifling sanctimony that overwhelms our culture, writes,

In the famous 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, Clarence Darrow stated: "For God’s sake, let the children have their minds kept open – close no doors to their knowledge; shut no door from them. Make a distinction between theology and science. Let them have both. Let them be taught. Let them both live." Have you ever met a 21st Century liberal who believes that both evolution and creation should be taught in schools? Or do they say "Let them have only one"?

Of course they say, let them have only one - only ours. The people who call themselves liberals these days are not, in any sense, liberals. They are materialists, naturalists, Darwinists, or whatever, but they are not - and probably never have been - liberals.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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Could God create through Darwinian evolution? Sure, but ... did he?

On my designorchance discussion group at Yahoo, someone asked (quoting a third party,

What is so objectionable about a God who created through evolution? Why can we accept that God front loaded the universe but we insist on something more when it comes to evolution?

I find it fascinating how creationists accept on the one hand front
loading in astronomy but cannot accept front loading in biology.

Can anyone, such as Denyse explain this?”

So I replied,

..., the key question is, what does the evidence reasonably suggest?

I can't speak for “creationists,” as I consider myself a post-Darwinist, but I do not think that the evidence reasonably supports the “mud to mind” account currently proposed by materialistic science for the origin of the life we see around us today, particularly humans.

The current information load in life forms is simply too high, within the life of the present universe.

Whether life forms with a high information load are produced by intervention or by initial encoding can possibly be answered by research.

I see Darwinists as trying to back away from the issue by pretending that natural selection has awesome powers that it does not really have.

For the record, I do not doubt that natural selection plays an important role, particularly in maintaining species against harmful drifts, and perhaps sometimes initiating new species. (I do NOT rule that out because it seems implicitly reasonable, but the evidence base is hardly very large and I doubt that natural selection accounts for massive, complex changes.)

Science does not yet have a way to understand the relationship between matter, energy, and information. I suspect - and said in By Design or by Chance? - that progress in this area requires addressing that difficult issue in particular.

As G.C. Williams writes:

Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes. You can’t measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn’t have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information. This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms. (pp. 233-34)

In my view, it is useless to speculate on what God did/might have done.

Historically, speculating on what God did/might have done would not have helped scientists determine whether Ptolemy or Copernicus was right about the organization of the solar system or whether or not spontaneous generation of life forms actually occurs.

In theory at least, God could have done it either way! Why not? In creating a specific universe, the only requirement for laws is that they be workable and self-consistent.

Various models are possible in theory; however, only one can prevail in fact in a given location.

What God DID (or, for those who do not believe in God, whatever actually happened) is for us to discover.

As I understand it, that is what science is: An attempt to discover what God did/what happened/what happens.

cheers, Denyse (Find out more about my book, go to By Design or by Chance? )