 Now that we know the designer of living things is powerful, invisible, malicious, or uncaring, immortal, or time-traveling, deceitful, or covert, I want to ask the next logical question. But before I get to that, I need to acknowledge an oversight. In my listing of entities who fit the character of the designer of life on earth, I overlook the following possibilities. Thanks for those who commented and set me straight. The possible identities of the designers include the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulhu, Doctor Who's Arch-Nemesis the Master, the Flying Pink Unicorn, an entire race of aliens rather than a single one, Kent Hovind, Ceiling Cat, Q from Star Trek, Nature, Machines or The Matrix, Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, but thankfully no one suggested Chuck Norris. So after we speculate on the who of the designer of life, we should then speculate on the how. After all, intelligent design is simply looking for the evidence of design and is in no way affiliated with creationism, or is it? For the sake of argument, let's assume the designer is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. After he designs life at his drawing board, how does his noodley appendage turn that design into a living being? Let's examine some options of how a designer implements his design. For the sake of neutrality, I will refer to the designer as Mr. G. You may feel free to insert your own favorite powerful invisible malicious or uncaring deceitful or covert entity. Creation One, Direct Creation Okay, Mr. G snaps his fingers and poof, life appears. But wait, then we're talking about both design and creation in one argument. Why, this could result in intelligent design being intelligent design and creation, and that sounds an awful lot like plain old creationism, which can be defined as the creation of life by a supernatural entity. Can it be that the intelligent design people haven't noticed this, that their hypothesis includes a supernatural creator as well as a designer? I'm going to have to ask that anyone at the Discovery Institute clarify this point for me. If you are agnostic about the source of design, are you also agnostic about the method of implementation of the design? Do you have any plans to test for how the design is implemented? Let's look at another alternative to creationism. Option Two, Indirect Creation In this model, Mr. G designs the living things, but a separate team are responsible for the implementation and construction of the design. They are the ones who make up DNA in big batches, and move fossils and living animals around to give the appearance of common descent. One can only speculate on their characteristics, but I envision a celestial or infernal version of the Kibler elves. Only instead of cookies, they're making up batches of malaria and kittens. In this model, Mr. G designs the living things, but a separate team are responsible for the implementation and construction of the design. They are the ones who make up DNA in big batches, and move fossils and living things around to give the appearance of common descent. Now depending on how good these celestial or infernal Kibler elves are, we should be able to detect their handiwork, a fossilized footprint, a six inch humanoid skeleton in a tar pit, the remains of a pointy hat in the fossilized rib cage of a tyrannosaur, some evidence of chisel marks on DNA strands, or evidence of chocolate chips in your early eukaryotes. To my knowledge, this evidence has not yet been found, but I am sure it is just a matter of funding and time. Option three, limited intervention. It could be that Mr. G's crack team of life manufacturers are making the first two of every animal in some celestial or infernal animal factory, then transporting them to Earth. This might explain the lack of evidence of elf and magic, where these animals are manufactured in how they are transported is not obvious from the living things. Maybe they arrive on a long string of spaghetti, or arrive in the trunk of a DeLorean. We should look for fossilized evidence of pasta in the Precambrian, or Goodyear Tire Tracks in the Burgess Shale. Now I'm sure I'm missing a few possibilities, the whole matrix-esque subjective reality argument or recolonization of transgenic animals from alien worlds, but I hope this is given proponents of intelligent design a chance to think about their theory, which is clearly not religious in any fashion, and strictly derives from an observation of evidence. What the future holds for intelligent design is unknown, but my hope is it will expand from a strict search for the designer of life to also acknowledging that the manufacturer of life is a part of that search. Now why do I have a sudden craving for Chip's Deluxe Cookies?