Response to the compatibility of evolution and design: with Zachary Ardern, “The Contentious Compatibility of Evolution and Design: Introduction to the Book Symposium”; David H. Glass, “An Evaluation of the Biological Case for Design”; Meghan D. Page, “Thomist or Tumblrist: Comments on The Compatibility of Evolution and Design by E. V. R. Kojonen”; Peter Jeavons, “The Design of Evolutionary Algorithms: A Computer Science Perspective on the Compatibility of Evolution and Design”; Denis R. Alexander, “Evolution, Chance, Necessity, and Design”; Bethany N. Sollereder, “Response to The Compatibility of Evolution and Design”; Mats Wahlberg, “Divine Design and Evolutionary Evil”; and Erkki V. R. Kojonen, “Response: The Compatibility of Evolution and Design.”

The first half of this article offers two possibilities of how the argument Kojonen makes might be vulnerable to other new developments in evolutionary science and psychology—potential broadsides that might threaten to sink the salvaged ship of design once again. Work on the development of life suggests that life is a simplification of surrounding environmental information, and there-fore life does not generate new information. Second, the psychology of pareidolia suggests we find design as a bias of our information processing, rather than observing something that exists. The second half of the article offers a critique of how the metaphors we use to describe God and the world shape our approaches to solving theological and philosophical questions (particularly theodicy). I offer some organic metaphors in place of the usual mechanistic metaphors to think about how the design argument could be reformulated.