Design in Living Things

Molecular biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic, concluded:
‘Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced [twentieth century technology appears] clumsy … . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.’3
The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins, states:
‘We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance.’4
Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the Bible’s explanation that God created all.
However, evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a Designer. He comments (emphasis added):
‘All appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind … . It has no mind … . It does not plan for the future … it is the blind watchmaker.’5
Selection and design
Life is built on information, contained in that molecule of heredity, DNA. Dawkins believes that natural selection6 and mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA) together provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts of information responsible for the design in living things.7
Natural selection is a logical process that can be observed. However, selection can only operate on the information already contained in genes—it does not produce new information.8 Actually, this is consistent with the Bible’s account of origins; God created distinct kinds of animals and plants, each to reproduce after its own kind.
One can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of natural selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves, and coyotes have developed over time as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of the wolf/dog kind.
But no new information was produced—these varieties have resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out, of the information in the original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to change into a totally different kind with new information that previously did not exist!
Without a way to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this, but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon.