Is Intelligent Design a Rational or Irrational belief (5)

I thank Con for their reply.Evidence and explanations of the evidenceCon says "They could involve fairies, aliens, time travel, angels and demons, etc. etc. But what makes these theories, along with Intelligent Design, unable to be taken seriously by any rational person is their severe absence of evidence"Its just not about lack of evidence, it also about what we should or reasonably infer from the evidence. I assume that Con is talking about "evidence" within a scientific context. "In scientific research evidence is accumulated through observations of phenomena that occur in the natural world, or which are created as experiments in a laboratory or other controlled conditions. Scientific evidence usually goes towards supporting or rejecting a hypothesis." [1]Do we need to "observe" the thing in question, in order to be justified in order to believe it ? The answer is no, consider the example of gravity. We can observe all day long the motion of objects, but we can't actually observe gravity its self. The evidence is the motion of the objects (what we can see), the explanation of the evidence is the theory of gravity. (something we can't see).This shows that we don't need to see something in order to be justified in believing in it.Cars, Paleys clock and the design inference.Con says "You decided to use a vehicle instead of a pocket watch, but the argument is still unchanged. There are many fallacies involved in the analogy. For starters, it is not because a car or a pocket watch has purposeful, complimenting parts that we believe it was intelligently designed. It is because of the one simple thing I mentioned before, the one thing that makes an argument viable: evidence. All of the evidence we have ever seen surrounding vehicles and pocket watches points toward a human creator of these things (company logos, factories, etc."Con correctly points out that their is no direct observation of a universe been built, unlike a car (for example a car factory), or that we can't have a chat with the universe designer unlike a car designer. But I didn't equate the design inference of the car and the universe based on the observation of such things been built or that we could have a chat to the designers. As I said before... "Even if we had no observations of the car actually being built and design, we could still make a reasonable judgement that the car was designed based on its different parts working complimentary to one another." & "Even if we have no observations of the human being built and designed, we could still make a reasonable judgement that the human was designed based on its different parts working complimentary to one another."Con says "We never see cars coming into existence by means other than human design. On the contrary, we do see organisms and galaxies forming by means other than intelligent design. We can observe the natural births of animals and the natural formation of solar systems. Every piece of evidence ever collected surrounding life points to a completely natural origin."Sure these things are "natural", but the question is whether intelligent design is involved. The fact that there are things that are "natural" doesn't tell us one way or another whether intelligent design is involved or if the natural thing is totally absent any design.Con says "You also stated "If something has multiple parts working complimentary to each other, its more probable that its designed than not designed" but this simply is not true. By that logic, it would be very probable to assume something as simple as a sheet of paper was not at all intelligently designed,"I would have to reject the claim that a sheet of paper is "simple". By complex I mean something which has multiple parts.Fine Tuning and the DesignerCon says "If you believe this Intelligent Designer has always existed (as I believe the universe has always existed)"The best science to date says that the universe began to exist and has not always existed.Con says "You stated that "there is no reason to think the laws and or the constants of the universe are necessary, they could of been different". The same scrutiny must apply to your Intelligent Designer."Indeed it should.Con says about the intelligent designer "it would have always had these characteristics and not because it wanted them, but because it simply always had them by chance. As you can see, this only adds an unnecessary and unsatisfactory step."I don't believe its an unnecessary step for two reasons........1) Something must exist which is uncased.2) Something that exists which is uncased exists be necessity and not by chance.If everything that exists has a cause, this results in an infinite regress. Either everything that exists has a cause or there is something that exists that doesn't have a cause. The designer of the universe could be a necessary being/something that exists without a cause and as such exists by necessity and not chance. This resolves the objection that if we reject a universe existing just by chance, we should also reject an intelligent designer that exists by chance.I look forward to Cons reply.Sources [1] http://en.wikipedia.org...