Anna, you wrote: ” .. . if any ID adherent can tell us how God/ the Designer must have done it is science, I would like to hear it.”
I take the following paragraphs from Nancy Pearcey’s book “Total Truth” (2005),pp.181-2:
“Critics say that the concept of design does not belong in science. They argue that it is a ‘science stopper’ that puts an end to scientific investigation . . . . But that accusation is based on a misunderstanding. The process of detecting design is thoroughly empirical. In fact, it is already an important element in several areas of science. Back in 1967, I was startled to read a newspaper article announcing that astronomers may have discovered radio messages coming from outer space. They dubbed the signals ‘LGM’ to signify ‘Little Green men.’ Later, however, they realized that the radio impulses were coming in a regular, recurring pattern like the flashing of a lighthouse, not an irregular pattern like the sequence of letters in a message. what they had discovered were not aliens but pulsars–rotating stars.
“Today astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have worked out extensive criteria for recognizing when a radio signal is an encoded message and when it is just a natural phenomenon, like a pulsar. In other words, they have developed criteria for distinguishing between products of design and products of natural causes.”
“The same distinction is made in several other fields:
-Detectives are trained to distinguish murder (design) from death by natural causes.
-Archaeologists have criteria for distinguishing when a stone has the distinctive chip marks of a primitive tool (design), and when its shape is simply the result of weathering and erosion.
-Insurance companies have steps for deciding whether a fire was a case of arson (design) or just an accident.
-Cryptologists have worked out procedures to determine whether a set of symbols is a secret message (design) or merely a random sequence.”
Pearcey later sets forth the most recent and powerful evidence that living systems were designed: the DNA code, which is made up of chemically arbitrary sequences of 4 chemical “letters” (amino acids). She allows Richard Dawkins to explain the significance of this, “What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. The genetic code is truly digital,in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth.” (Richard Dawkins, “Why Prince Charles is So Wrong”, Checkbiotech.org, January 28, 2003 at http://www.checkbiotech.org.)
Clearly, just as a design implies a designer, a book (or computer code)implies an author. Given that any one cell in our bodies contains more information than “the entire 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica” (Total Truth, p. 196), how can it be irrational to suspect an intelligent source of so much complex information?
