A case for Natural Design

I guess it depends on what you mean by "design." You seem to be using the term to mean "organization." I thought it was supposed to mean a project with an end in view.

Okay, so there are these group of frogs with not very long tongues. Then by random mutation a frog is born with a slightly longer tongue. This frog is able to snatch bugs easier than the other frogs, and so it lives and reproduces other frogs with the slighter longer tongue, and eventually the frogs with the shorter tongues die out becuase the longer-tongued frogs eat all the bugs. So the "function" of the construction of the longer tongue was to catch bugs better? It was just by chance that the tongue was able to serve that function. There might have been a mutation that served no function at all or negatively affected its chance of survival.

"Natural design" sounds like an oxymoron to me. A design is a blueprint or plan, as when an architect says,"Here's my design for the new building."Natural selection doesn't design anything in that sense. However, if you look at something in hindsight, you can say,"The hawk is a great design, with its flying ability and super sense of sight. Nature designed the hawk very well." The IDer looks at "design" in this sense, in hindsight. They talk about the exquisiteness of this or that evolutionary development and say, "There's no way this could happen by chance. The odds against it are phenomenal. Think of the extraordinary complicated events that had to take place for the hawk to evolve." But of course any evolutionary development is "exquisite," when looked at in hindsight. In fact, any event is exquisite. If my mother had left 5 minutes earlier at that train station, and never met my Dad, I would never have been born. What an extraordinary set of coincidences had to occur in order for them to meet just at that point in space time! Obviously, I was designed."natural design" sounds like a sort of Life Force idea, as though nature said to itself, "I need something with hands, something that can pick things up. Let's work on that."

I don't see this. It's just a matter of what topic is being discussed. If my topic is motorcycles, and somebody starts talking about cars, and I tell them they are off-topic, it doesn't mean that I think motorcycles are more important than cars. The topic here is about "design" in the evolution of life forms. Snowflakes are not a life form.

Is that different from what I said earlier? :"However, if you look at something in hindsight, you can say,'The hawk is a great design, with its flying ability and super sense of sight. Nature designed the hawk very well.'"If it's not different, I think I am beginning to dimly understand what you mean.

Yes, but I said, "Nature designed the hawk very well." It's a sort of value system. Are you hinting at a value system? Design is good, nature designs, nature is good. After all, your own philosopher Dennet said at the end of his book, "The world is sacred." There's a value system. Something along the lines of nature-worship.