Harvard's George Church is going to give the anti-ID crowd a case of the vapors with talk like this:
We're acting as engineers, possibly as intelligent designers. The religiously-inclined would not put humans in the same league with the "Intelligent Designer", or God. As creative as we become, and as industrious and as good as we are at designing and manufacturing living things, which we've been doing since the stone age - no matter how good we get at that, it's like calling a candle a supernova. A candle is not a super nova; it's not even in the same league. And we, as intelligent designers, are not in the same league as the "Intelligent Design" forces that started the whole shebang. We're not designing sub-atomic particles from scratch; we're not designing galaxies. We're really not even designing the basic idea of life; we're just manipulating it.
Church is a biologist at Harvard trying to fabricate living systems. As he describes his work (see link) it's clear that all the metaphors and analogies he employs presuppose that the fabricated systems must be engineered using mathematics and computation. In other words, apparently life cannot adequately be explained without the use of figures of speech which suggest that it is the product of intelligent agency and purpose.
