I looked up design at dictionary.com and got the following:
To conceive or fashion in the mind, invent
To make or execute plans, devise
To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect
To have as a goal or purpose in mind, intend
The purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts
A plan, a project.
A reasoned purpose; an intent
Deliberate intention
Also:
âDesignedâ as an adjective means âdone, performed, or made with purpose and intent often despite an appearance of being accidental, spontaneous or natural ..... syn see DELIBERATE.âWebster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, (1993).
Now, let's compare that to how natural selection is defined by a prominent Darwinist:
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life....Natural selection has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."[Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1987), ix.]
So what we see here described is a process of non-intelligent design, unconscious design, design without foresight, design without intention or purpose. But the very notion of design cannot be thought of absent an intent, a scheme, a protocol, a plan, or an intellect. Non-intelligent arrangements of things can be complex; but if they are not purposefully and intentionally complex then the word "design" is incorrect. A design is a pattern of events arranged with intent for a purpose. A design reflects a choice made by a mind to affect the future in a particular way.
Here's a relevant quote: "The opposite of a design is an occurrence. An occurrence is something that just happens without intention.Occurrences are ultimately driven only by chemical and physical laws and chance. Lacking a mind, natural occurrences have no concept of the future and do not occur for a purpose in the future. Of course logic suggests that the laws, matter and energy themselves may have been ordered by a mind for a purpose, in which case all events may be intended in this sense. However, if a mind uses a random process like law and chance alone, without subsequent intervention to change an outcome for a future purpose, the results of that process will be an occurrence and not a design.
Some argue that an evolutionary process like the foregoing could have been used to frontload the universe with information so that it would all unfold in a way that would accommodate our existence. This is a deistic notion of a designer who pushes a button and lets everything unfold without intervention. However, as Stephen J. Gould and Kenneth Miller point out, such a process will necessarily produce unintended, purposeless and unpredictable results because the process is inherently random and therefore unpredictable. One cannot look at the forty different body plans that arose suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion and predict which would meet evolutionary success. If the clock was rewound and the very same button was pushed again, a different outcome would arise and we would not be here. This is because natural âselectionâ is driven by both hypothesized random mutations and random environmental
pressures. Hence, a deistic push of a button in the first instance could not logically intend our occurrence, assuming its use of a mechanism driven only by law and chance."
Designs have a future perspective, occurrences do not. Designs reflect purpose, occurrences do not. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, discusses this issue in his new book Darwin and Design: Does evolution have a purpose? The apparent design of nature is a problem for a materialistic view of science. In this view nothing is actually designed. Everything just occurs, only from law and chance. We are all occurrences. The difficulty is that
this conclusion, which may work in physics and chemistry, is very counter intuitive in biology. Biological systems like eyes and ears have a future perspective, a function, and look designed. Hence many biologists use design terminology in describing them. According to Michael Ruse, that terminology is merely metaphorical because we âknowâ the systems are not designed. His problem is whether it is appropriate to use the metaphor or whether it should be discarded, because, in his view it may be misleading to call something designed, when it really isnât. If we conclude that something is a design and not just an occurrence, then logic leads us to two important conclusions: (a) the thing has an inherent purpose and (b) that at some time in the past a mind existed to create it for that purpose. If on the other hand, we deem the thing to be an occurrence, then it has no inherent purpose. Also, we cannot use it to infer the prior existence of a mind. Of course, if all natural phenomena are occurrences, then none have a purpose and there is nothing we can observe in the natural world that would support belief in the existence of a mind other than our own and those of animals and other entities that our minds control.
Those who believe that life is an occurrence are materialists. Those who believe that life reflects design are teleologists. A teleologist is one step removed from a theist. A materialist is one step removed from an atheist.
