BioLogos Foundation,
You wrote, “The problem of imperfect design in nature raises serious concerns for the idea of God as the divine engineer, the metaphor put forward by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement. After all, if God designed each detail in the blueprint of life, why would he create mammalian eyes which have a blind spot?”
I would suggest that there is no “problem of imperfect design [dysteleology].” This is like saying that there is a problem with science because of the findings regarding the strange activities of sub-atomic particles.
Let me use another example. If a space probe of Mars fails to find any evidence of intelligent life for its first 99 days and then finds a collection bound volumes with strange script in a cave on the next day, it would be ludicrous to conclude that the 99 days of no evidence for ID would discount the evidence found on the last day. Lack of evidence fails to negate the finding of subsequent evidence.
Furthermore, even if you could prove “poor design” in some creatures, it just highlights the profound design we find in many others. If you are trying to argue that “poor design” weighs against ID, then you are compelled by your logic to conclude that profound design features argue in favor of ID.

Intelligent design theorists do not conceive of a mechanistic universe where God is merely an engineer — in fact, they’ve clearly used the analogy of God as Artist, even as Logan Gage put it in a post at Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog:
“Second, and more to our point, as post-modern philosophers of science often point out, even the questions we ask are from a certain frame of reference. Miller seems to ask, ‘Why would God create a world which he has to tinker with?’ But wouldn’t it be equally valid to ask, ‘Why would God design a process in which he isn’t going to be involved?’
Is ‘tinkering’ really the only way to look at it? Tinkering is a rather loaded term. Did Monet ‘tinker’ or did he add detail, richness, and complexity? Would Monet have been a better artist if instead of tinkering with paintings he created a machine which relied upon a random number generator to manufacture them without his involvement? It might have saved him some work, but it wouldn’t have let him be an artist. (And one supposes God isn’t too concerned with saving work.)
St. Thomas often relied upon the principle that effects cannot be greater than their causes. In this regard, wouldn’t it be odd if the creator of artists should not also be an artist?”
I would suggest you also read a book by two ID proponents, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s “A Meaningful World,” where the argument for design is made from the perspective of artistic genius and genius in Nature.

Yet what if we view God through another metaphor, like that of an artist? Certainly, this does not solve the engineering problems, but it causes us not to look at them as engineering problems anymore. Furthermore, as Giberson notes, “We might begin to see the world as creative and extravagant in its beauty rather than red in tooth in claw.”

But of course life is nothing like art, either, as artists aren’t constrained by history like evolution is.
Don’t forget that Behe tries to get around the lack of actual marks of design in life by pointing out that art might “look undesigned” or some such thing. Which is ridiculous, both because almost any art does reveal its design (in the frame of a painting, placement, etc.) and because you don’t take care of the lack of an actual case for design by excusing the lack of expected evidence by some special case of a designer who hides the design.
If you are trying to save God in evolved life, why not just say that God’s purposes and plans are simply not our own? That’s what IDists often do, while they still like to claim that the “appearance of design” is there when the only “designer” for which we can find evidence is evolutionary contingency. Of course the results of that might produce an extravagance of form that, for all we know, might be pleasing to God. It is not, however, the exploration of different forms and ideas that we get in art, it is instead a story of constraint from history, with extravagant abundance building directly upon odd (from an artistic or design standpoint–from the view of intelligence) limitations coming from heredity.
Life is causally limited in a way that intelligence has never been.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p

“God is never spoken of as a ‘designer’ in the Bible; he is the Creator and Father, and a father does not ‘design’ his children.

I’ve made that point several times in various places. Indeed, the second story of creation is one that makes God appear like a sculptor, who then simply animates the sculpture of Adam by breathing “spirit” into him.
Most ancient stories of creation seem to avoid any idea of actual “design” in life, instead using reproduction, metamorphosis, artistry, and magic to produce “first life.” After all, life really is not much like our machines or other designs.
It seems that the idea of the “design of life” didn’t become very popular until the industrial revolution, although it does crop up in a few ancient writings.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p

Glen and BioLogos,
You wrote, “God is never spoken of as a ‘designer’ in the Bible; he is the Creator and Father, and a father does not ‘design’ his children.”
You might want to check your Bible about this assertion:
• Ephes. 2:10 For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
• Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
• Job 12:9 Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?
• Isaiah 44:2 This is what the LORD says–he who made you, who formed you in the womb, and who will help you…
• Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Is your denial of God as designer an example of Darwin-driven theology?

Daniel Mann wrote:
I would suggest that there is no “problem of imperfect design [dysteleology].” This is like saying that there is a problem with science because of the findings regarding the strange activities of sub-atomic particles.
Science is not the cause of the sub-atomic particles, it observes them. God is, however, responsible for the design.
Daniel Mann wrote:
Furthermore, even if you could prove “poor design” in some creatures, it just highlights the profound design we find in many others. If you are trying to argue that “poor design” weighs against ID, then you are compelled by your logic to conclude that profound design features argue in favor of ID.
If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, “poor design” should not be present. Are you arguing that God intentionally created “poor designs” to highlight his “profound ones”? A mixture of “poor design” and “profound design” is what you would expect to see in nature if evolution is at work. How would “profound design” in nature compel one to accept ID when there is an alternative (evolution) that can explain “poor design” and “profound design” without working to make justifications for God’s poor design?

I posted this article on Facebook, and someone has already responded glibly that the answer to imperfect design is “a little thing called the Fall”.

That doesn’t surprise me, Steve. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, most Christians have very little interest in Intelligent Design because the kind of thinking that I.D. requires (respect for reason and science) raises doubts about the validity of Christianity itself.

From a child’s perspective, having to eat carrots instead of Chips Ahoy cookies with dinner is imperfect design.
Perspective, perspective, perspective.

I’ll have to look up the other parts of that video on You Tube. For an alternate take on this the link below is a video by Neil deGrasse Tyson the director of the Hayden Planetarium:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_nqySMvkcw&feature=player_embedded

Dan
Of course God is Creator, but none of these refs speak of “designer”.
FWIW Job is about God’s affliction of him.
And in Eph 2:10 the word poiema means workmanship/creation – literally the product of His doings/acts and does not mean that He designed us, as opposed to created us in fatherly love. Jesus teaches us to call God Father – anf Fathers do not “design” their children

Amy,
Once again, I want to re-assert that chaos or “bad design” fails to diminish the fact that good design argues for ID, any more than my chaotic apartment diminishes the evidence that an intelligent being (according to some) lives there. We still have to account for the positive evidence for ID, no matter how much evidence there is for chaos.
However, you raise another question: “Which paradigm best accounts for our findings of both “poor design” and wonderful design—evolution or ID?” You opt for evolution. However, even with those structures considered as “poor design,” I am awed by what I see! The human eye transcribes, transmits, reconstitutes, and brings to a conscious gestalt billions of electro-chemical impulses each second. Consequently, I experience no design deficiency as I weave through the uncompromising NYC traffic on my bike.
But this is only the beginning! Microscopic spiders weave perfect webs, birds infallibly fly thousands of miles to an unknown destination. Worms transform themselves into butterflies, and a programmed script reaching several lifetimes eventually bring them back again. In all this, I see intelligent design.
I look at my own life — a calibrated moral sense, thinking that transcends the most sophisticated computers, consciousness, and even our materially inexplicable freewill — and I see God’s handiwork. I look at the simple compounds that comprise me – DNA, proteins, cell walls – each stubbornly defying naturalistic explanation, and I see my Maker.
Then I look at the inanimate world of a universe fine-tuned to become our felicitous home, unchanging, harmonious, and elegant laws, and heavens that move predictably despite the surrounding expansions, and I see God
However, when I look towards Darwin and his naturalism, I see no explanation for beauty, for rationality, for the perfect, simple and elegant laws of nature. It tells me nothing satisfying about the unity and interconnectedness of all things. It utters not a word to explain why mass, energy, matter, space, and even the speed of light are all related and relative to one another. (Explosions like the Big Bang just can’t account for such marvels!) It tells me nothing about the origin of the building blocks or origins of life. It remains silent before the grandeur of our finely-tuned universe.
Darwinism is a child who believes his father has created the world because he brings the groceries home at night and other micro-provisions. Its scientists — who claim that everything came out of nothing — are like that crowds who couldn’t perceive that the king had no clothing, and those who perceive it are afraid to speak. Consequently, when I look at Darwinism, I see repression; I see a bully who is attempting to stifle every contrary voice.
Amy, I must admit that it utterly confounds me that Christians can dismiss the Biblical testimony regarding ID (Romans 1:19-20; Acts 14:17; Psalm 19) and also the fruits of their own senses. All His created order cries out to proclaim His glory!

Nicholas,
I’m very excited that you are now participating on our blog! You are just the sort of person we need here. I also want to tell you how much I enjoyed the book you co-authored with the Rev. John Polkinghorne,
Question of Truth.
Welcome!

Mann – For someone who’s so adamant about having things interpreted and understood correctly, you seem to have trouble understanding what others say.
“Darwinism” – and I’ll be generous and assume you mean ‘biological evolution’ including natural selection and so forth – isn’t intended to offer an explanation for “rationality, for the perfect, simple and elegant laws of nature”. It shows how, given those laws, the kind of beautiful forms (like the “Microscopic spiders weave perfect webs, birds infallibly fly thousands of miles to an unknown destination. Worms transform themselves into butterflies”) can arise.
(If you really want some “interconnectedness of all things”, though, read “Evolution for Everyone” by David Sloan Wilson.)
For the laws of nature and such, you need to look to physics.
You also don’t seem to understand the Big Bang. That theory does not “claim that everything came out of nothing”. It’s just the furthest back we’ve been able to push our understanding so far.
At one point, we didn’t know how mountains formed – then came plate tectonics. Then got a handle on the formation of the Earth, and related it to the solar system. Later, we got a handle on galactic development. We’ve pushed our understanding as far back as a few femtoseconds after the Big Bang, but before that, we’re still not sure yet.
Jumping from “we don’t know yet” to “we can’t know” is unwarranted, though. Recall the recent article on “God of the Gaps” reasoning…

Ray,
Your “zingers” do not reflect well upon you, especially when used by a worldview – Darwinism — that has arrogantly claimed the intellectual high-ground.
You wrote, “You also don’t seem to understand the Big Bang. That theory does not “claim that everything came out of nothing”. It’s just the furthest back we’ve been able to push our understanding so far.”
We are all aware of this stance, but we are also aware of the fact – as Fred Hoyle famously retorted – that tornadoes don’t tromp through junkyards leaving Boeing 747s in their wake. We know that some intelligence must be involved. Meanwhile, science has been co-opted by philosophical naturalism, which is misdirecting valuable resources.

Mann – I’m not trying for “zingers”; I truly haven’t seen that you have a solid understanding of what you’re criticizing. Come, let us reason together.
The “stance” I’m talking about is not a rhetorical trick – it’s how scientists actually understand the Big Bang: as far back as we’ve been able to extrapolate, so far. And it doesn’t require massive improbabilities to produce things like galaxies and stars and planets – gravity and time do that well, given the laws of physics.
(The laws themselves can’t count as evidence either way – as Einstein noted, it’s not clear they could be different. With his penchant for religious metaphor, he asked, “Did God have any choice in creating the universe?” And, as Bertrand Russell noted, “…the whole idea that natural laws
imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…”)
Now, I’ll ask you a question: How would you direct scientific resources? What would a philosophically supernaturalist scientific program look like?