Yes. "Design" explains everything. And nothing. Tell me, if everything is a design, brought about by these wonderful, invisible cosmic designers, what is your explanation for harmful mutations? They are consistent with the theory of evolution, but they shouldn't exist in a "designed" biosphere.
”The logical challenge is usually posed in the form of a statement such as this:
1. A good God would destroy evil.
2. An all powerful God could destroy evil.
3. Evil is not destroyed.
4. Therefore, there cannot possibly be such a good and powerful God.
“…God could not eliminate evil without at the same time rendering it impossible to accomplish other goals which are important to Him. Certainly, for God to create beings in his own image, who are capable of sustaining a personal relationship with Him, they must be beings who are capable of freely loving Him and following his will without coercion. Love or obedience on any other basis would not be love or obedience at all, but mere compliance. But creatures who are free to love God must also be free to hate or ignore Him. Creatures who are free to follow His will must also be free to reject it. And when people act in ways outside the will of God, great evil and suffering is the ultimate result. This line of thinking is known as the "free will defense" concerning the problem of evil.
But what about natural evil--evil resulting from natural processes such as earthquakes, floods and diseases? Here it is important first to recognize that we live in a fallen world, and that we are subject to natural disasters that would not have occurred had man not chosen to rebel against God. Even so, it is difficult to imagine how we could function as free creatures in a world much different than our own--a world in which consistent natural processes allow us to predict with some certainty the consequences of our choices and actions. Take the law of gravity, for instance. This is a natural process without which we could not possibly function as human beings, yet under some circumstances it is also capable of resulting in great harm.
Certainly, God is capable of destroying evil--but not without destroying human freedom, or a world in which free creatures can function. And most agree that this line of reasoning does successfully respond to the challenge of the logical problem of evil. “
…Surely it is difficult for us to understand why God would allow some things to happen. But simply because we find it difficult to imagine what reasons God could have for permitting them, does not mean that no such reasons exist. It is entirely possible that such reasons are not only beyond our present knowledge, but also beyond our present ability to understand. A child does not always understand the reasons that lie behind all that his father allows or does not allow him to do. It would be unrealistic for us to expect to understand all of God's reasons for allowing all that He does. We do not fully understand many things about the world we live in--what lies behind the force of gravity for instance, or the exact function of subatomic particles. Yet we believe in these physical realities.
This argument cuts both ways. Also, intelligent design does not mean optimal design, as William Dembski makes clear in the lengthy passage I posted a while back.
As ID supplants evolution and teleology is reintroduced to the study of life, benefits are bound to emerge. For example, it would have been far less likely that scientists operating under an ID paradigm would have incorrectly operated under the assumption that the appendix is a useless artifact of the evolutionary process.
Also, ID better explains natural phenomena like irreducibly complex systems (like Behe's flagella) and the sudden appearance and disappearance of morphologically rigid animal species in the fossil record.
Tell me, if everything is a design, brought about by these wonderful, invisible cosmic designers, what is your explanation for harmful mutations? They are consistent with the theory of evolution, but they shouldn't exist in a "designed" biosphere.
Again, you're confusing optimal design with intelligent design. When you look at an old AMC Pacer, you know that it wasn't designed by random chance but rather by an intelligent agent, even if not the most intelligent, intelligent agent.
Similarly with ID. It's easy to conflate the Designer of ID with the Designer of monotheism. But monotheists, and Catholics like me in particular, do not have a uniform understanding of who or what the Designer of ID is.
First of all, Christians disagree over whether this is the best of all possible worlds.
Also, Catholics are required to believe that God created the world from nothing and that Adam and Eve were the parents of the human race. But as far as I remember, the rest is open to speculation. One permissible theory is that the devil was allowed to corrupt Creation after his being cast down from Heaven prior to Adam and Eve's fall from grace.
So, at least from this Catholic's point of view, we should see a fundamentally ordered cosmos with a significantly smaller proportion of evils or disorders. Of course, it's sadly ironic that modern science attacks the philosophical system from which it was necessarily born. Natural scientists operate under the assumptions that they are observing a uniform, predictable universe and that their sensible faculties (and even intellectual abilities to some degree) are free from error. It's no accident that science arose in the West and not the East where the physical universe is "maya" or illusion, and particularly in the Christian West following on the promulgation of the dogma of creation ex nihilo, as Stanley Jaki so ably argues.