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Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose ... Physics books may be complicated, but ... The objects and phenomena that a physics book describes are simpler than a single cell in the body of its author. And the author consists of trillions of those cells, many of them different from each other, organized with intricate architecture and precision-engineering into a working machine capable of writing a book.

Theists and atheists alike can see design in biological and biochemical systems. Even the well-known evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist, acknowledges that.

Designed objects look designed, so much so that some people - probably, alas, most people - think that they are designed. These people are wrong. ... the true explanation -Darwinian natural selection- is very different

“[n]atural 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,”

Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin's greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.

Even scientists who maintain that undirected processes (natural selection operating iteratively on random genetic change) produced the elegant chemical systems in the living realm find this appearance of biochemical design awe-inspiring.

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. ... This mechanism being observed ..., the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

Paley drives his point home with beautiful and reverent descriptions of the dissected machinery of life, beginning with the human eye... Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong...If [natural selection] can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

most individuals have no idea how they make the distinction between an intelligently designed object and one generated by natural processes. They just intuitively do.

So even though life’s chemistry looks as if it’s the product of a Creator, many in the scientific community suppress this obvious intuition.

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 a 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 at all.

But exactly where, we may ask, was Paley refuted? Who has answered his argument? How was the watch produced without an intelligent designer? It is surprising but true that the main argument of the discredited Paley has actually never been refuted. Neither Darwin nor Dawkins, neither science nor philosophy, has explained how an irreducibly complex system such as a watch might be produced without a designer.

A crucial, often-overlooked point is that the overwhelming appearance of design strongly affects the burden of proof: in the presence of manifest design, the onus of proof is on the one who denies the plain evidence of his eyes.

We can identify a thing as designed, even when we do not know its purpose, only if it resembles the things we make to express our purposes.

The merit of the Watchmaker argument then rests on the questions: Do living systems resemble man-made machines enough to warrant the analogy? And, if so, how strong is this analogy, and can a conclusion reasonably be drawn from it?

Hume's criticism of the design argument that asserts a fundamental difference between mechanical systems and living systems is out of date, destroyed by the advance of science which has discovered the machinery of life.

exciting new nano- and biotechnologies—such as DNA computing, DNA encryption, and DNA bar coding—provide justification for the biochemical intelligence argument. These emerging technologies reinforce the notion that biochemical information is indeed information. Their applications make use of data housed in DNA in much the same way that humans would handle information.

if evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet: "would be happy with [the] assumption that genes “contain” information in the same sense that modern computers do, or with the implication that organisms are merely their readouts? This analogy guided the formation of molecular biology. Like many analogies, it generated some good science, and more recently, a biotechnological revolution. But in singling out genes for causal efficacy at the expense of other epigenetic processes it created a scientific myth."

would be happy with [the] assumption that genes “contain” information in the same sense that modern computers do, or with the implication that organisms are merely their readouts? This analogy guided the formation of molecular biology. Like many analogies, it generated some good science, and more recently, a biotechnological revolution. But in singling out genes for causal efficacy at the expense of other epigenetic processes it created a scientific myth.

Without strong, convincing evidence to show that Darwin can do the trick, the public is quite rational to embrace design.

If a creature looks like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, feels like a dog, and pants like a dog, the burden of evidence lies with the person insisting the creature isn’t a dog.