But you know free will is doubted in philosophy for centuries. So it's obvious many people have problems with it. You make a problem about inferring intelligent design, from the observation that organisms look designed. So why wouldn't you be one of those people who has fundamental problems with free will altogether. And that is why you become hyper critical of theory about it, like intelligent design.
Free will is a very difficult concept for me to get my head around. I feel like I have free will, but all my thoughts and choices are built from my experience and inclinations, so i guess it's possible that i don't have free will.
It's also completely irrelevant to the intelligent design debate. People on all sides of the spiritual and scientific debates both believe and disbelieve in free will.
Free will provides predators and prey with surprise in attack and escape. You cannot know which way a choice is going to turn out, prior to it being made. So that is one aspect in which free will of organisms provides a useful survival function. One way in which knowledge about how things are chosen is useful.
Many animal decisions can be predicted with reasonable statistical accuracy. They are also affected by their natures, instincts and experience. But it's also irrelevant. The ability of complex animals and humans to both choose and design things in way is evidence that life is itself a product of choice.
When you get down to the ultimate detail of life, DNA, it's governed by the laws of chemistry. It reacts, it doesn't choose.
To make a choice means to make an alternative future the present. Or it can be defined as making a possible future the present or not. It's simple and fundamental. Having secure knowledge of a single choice made, we must then generalize this finding to it's natural limits. Like Newton generalized gravity from observing an apple fall. And there are no limits, the entire universe fits with the concept that it is chosen. Everything in the universe can be or not be, which are two alternatives in a choice.
Finding choice in the universe doesn't mean the entire universe is run on choices. Just like Isaac Newton saw the pattern of motion and force of Newton's Laws, and extrapolated them to the whole universe... and he was wrong.
Newton's laws much like pattern matching to assume design are often correct, but hey are not universal.
I don't know exactly what the decision processes were by which organisms came to be. It could be many independent choices coincedentally coming together. It could be a few intelligent choices, etc. I think parsimony is the default hypothesis. The basic ordering of the universe is the same as the basic ordering of the dna system, is the same as the basic ordering of the human mind. The DNA system can develop a wide variety of organisms. So I think the DNA system acts similar to a human mind, and that the organism is chosen in the dna system. Possibly in relation to the basic decisionprocesses in the universe in general. Possibly in relation to a brain or nerve celss already developed by an organism. Nature would use things that are available to be used.
Except DNA doesn't make decisions and isn't like a human mind. It's a chemical reaction.
Also instantaneous creation in whole is not beyond the scope of what is impossible to be chosen.
Why would we assume that is possible?
Intelligent design theory should predict that there is a balance between bases C and A, and T and G, or any other variation thereof. Also intelligent design theory should predict that the DNA system can be in a state where new DNA can be made. So that the DNA system has the stuff at the ready for making the new DNA, and that every combination of CATG is equally likely to occur. So you have a future of all possible combinations DNA, which can be decided on.
What you are describing is the chemistry of mutations and DNA replication... not choices.
And not every DNA sequence is as likely as any other. Most will not form viable organisms and so won't have an opportunity to replicate.
