Extrafire said:
Yes, and the nature of this universe and it's properties strongly suggest an intelligent cause because random chance couldn't have done it.
False dichotomy. How could you possibly know random chance couldn't have done it? You can't conceive of how anything but an intelligent designer could have created this universe and its observed properties. That's a limitation of your imagination, it doesn't justify that conclusion. In fact if you look more closely many things display a complete lack of design.
This touches again on the Argument from Irreducible Complexity, a variant of the Argument from Design you seem to favour, for which the usual example is the eye in the stuff I've read, so lets look at that more closely. No question, the eye is a highly complex structure that depends on many components working together to function properly, but that's not in itself evidence of design. A close look at the human eye in fact suggests a structure cobbled together from available bits with no design at all. The rods and cones that detect light, for instance, actually point away from the pupil, they're in there backwards. The blood vessels that supply the eye trace out a pattern in front of the light sensors, so a ruptured vessel blocks light from them. That's why diabetics go blind. Any first year engineering student could come up with a better design than that.
But the eyes of cephalopods (squids and octopuses) are much better than ours. Their rods and cones point toward the pupil, and the blood vessels are behind them. What does this mean? I can see one of three things: the designer likes cephalopods better; the designer's pretty sloppy and thus not worthy of unconditional admiration; there's no designer.
The whole human body is a terrible piece of design from an engineering standpoint. Our backs ache, our feet hurt, our bellies sag, our eyes lose close focus as we age, veins in our rectums swell and protrude painfully, and in the absence of modern medical and sanitation technologies many of us wouldn't survive childhood and most of us wouldn't make it to 30. It's only in the last century that parents have been able to routinely count on their children surviving to adulthood instead of being carried off by various microbes, which have been from the beginning and are still the dominant lifeform on the planet.
There was a time when the earth could not sustain life. There will be a time in the future when it cannot sustain life. There are 8 other planets in this system that cannot sustain our kind of life. None of the hundred or so other planets we've discovered can sustain our kind of life. Conditions in most of the universe are fatal to our kind of life. We're not particularly special; we can live comfortably only here, on this little planet, and not even on all of its surface. There's far more territory available to fish. What does that say about design? Nothing. Maybe the designer likes fish better. Or maybe he likes bacteria, or beetles, or mosquitos, or flies; there are far more of them than us.
If this is designed for us, the designer's an idiot. If the people who work for me did their jobs that badly I'd be firing their asses out the door.
