The most basic living cell was Intelligently Designed

Thanks Pro.I. PrefaceStrangely enough Pro has not taken the opportunity to state his case for intelligent design(ID), I am sure that he will present his case in earnest in the next round, but for now he has not satisfied his burden of proof at all.II. Why Intelligent Design is a bad theoryDetermining an intelligently designed thing from an unintelligently designed cannot easily be done so objectively. You are probably thinking to yourself 'But wait! It's obvious my iPhone is intelligently designed and a rock is not'. This is true, we humans recognise design by contrasting what we see with what we already know to be designed by humans, but take the following examples, of natural bridges. For somebody who has no idea about the natural processes available on earth, how would they be able to objectively determine if these bridges were intelligently designed or not? It sure seems like an organized effort to carve out a specic part of this rock face if required to achieve the design needed. One could also infer some prehistoric purpose these bridges could have served, perhaps for an ancient race to cross rivers.How are we to determine that cave if intelligently designed or not? As we could infer tha from the multiple attributes that make caves useful and purposeful, such as running water, narrow openings, shelter and regulation of temperature. These seem on the face of it to be attributes of something one would perhaps expect of something that is intelligently designed. The lack of objective means of determining design is the major weakness of any ID theory. Moreover, it is largely unfalsifiable, as virtually anything could be considered to have been made by an intelligence, including mountains or piles of poo. There could be a purpose they were erected for that is beyond our current understanding. ID fails on essentually every account on what a good theory should be.III. Lack of purpose of life:To the best of our understanding, life has no intrinsic purpose beyond a species' drive to survive and reproduce. One can look at a knife and presume without much thought it's purpose is to cuts thing, or look at a car and presume it's purpose is to move things. There are perhaps a few things that life might be useful for to an intelligent designed for, such as the production of natural organic products, but these traits have taken billions of years to arise and it seems prima facie implausible that an intelligent agency would willingly wait this long for this utility.Given that an intellgent agency that produced life would have a good understanding of natural processes, chemistry, physics, etc. Then it seems somewhat absurd that early life would have ever has any useful purpose to an intelligent agency, as many of the useful things life produces can be accomplished synthetically, for example useful natural products are often synthesized artifically today. Given that Pro is postulating ID for life, then it's reasonable to ask just what kind of purpose would life have been designed for? The absense of which seems to make ID that much less plausible.IV. The problem of negative Arguments for ID:One of the most common arguments for ID are those from probability. Which essentially attempts to find odds of life arising non-intelligently, and then the remaining chance would be that of an intelligent designer. This is known as a negative-proof, or proof by the implausibility of the contrary. Ignoring the fact that this reasoning assumes that life ever had to arise in the first place, even assuming as much in practice it makes for a poor argument for intelligence, as I will now demonstrate. Here I have dealt myself a 52 card hand, look at the order I have just dealt myself. Just imagine the odds of my getting this hand non-intelligently. Well that is easy to calculate, it's simply 52 factorial, or 8x10^67. An astonishingly small chance. I could be dealing myself hands till the death of the universe and I most certainly would never get this hand non-intelligently. All the cards that would have to appear in precise order in order to achieve this hand, it's just unthinkable I even got it in the first place without some intelligent selection process occurring.Obviously this is fallacious, and it applies to our current situation in many ways:1. Just how many of these potential hands could there be winners? Most of them? All of them? Only one of them?2. How many hands can we deal ourselves?3. We are moving the goalposts, that is we are starting with the result after we have already obtained itThese relate directly to life in the following ways:1. It's quite plausible that life could have arisen in many different ways, we just don't know as we have a sample size of one.2. We already know there are multiple potential 'attempts' at life.3. When look in retrospecive at how we got to or result, then any long chain will seem astonishingly unlikely, as we are starting with the result (life) and looking backwards (anthropic principle)To expand on point #2 some more, the observable universe is ~13.7 billion years old, and contains 10^24 planets, an astonishingly large number yes, a large number of 'attempts' are possible. But this doesn't even account for planets outside the observable universe, which is theorized to be several orders of magnitude greater[1]. Given large sample sets, even the most improbable of non-intelligent events becomes inevitable.Point #3 is also important, as we are only ever going to be raising this question on planets where life has already arisen (anthropic principle), lookig back form anh result onc eyou have already obtained it will naturally yield an astonishingly small probability. Another example is what are the chances of me existing? A particular sperm needed to hit a particular egg, back several hundred generations. The chances of me existing in the absense of an intelligent process are going to be rediculously small. However this is obviously a rediculous statement.Point #1 is arguably the least well understood variable.We just do not know all the conditions that could give rise to life. We have a sample size of one on Earth, and there is no reason to think that many other, different ways, and conditions could also give rise to life.V.Existing non-intelligent explanations:We already know of a very powerful process already involved in life that very plausibly drives the formation of 'intelligently designed' attributes, which is evolution via. natural selection. A process that is purely driven by what is effectively one big autocatalytic process, which catalyses the transformation of high-energy stuff (photons of light from the sun, organic matter, other high energy molecules) into lower-energy stuff with a release of energy and therefore, overall increase in entropy. Therefore, overall life appears to be one big entropy-increasing machine, and entropy is essentially the biggest driver of any process in nature.In evolution, increasingly complex structures which perform the same functions better, or other beneficial functions are realized via a cumulative and iterative process. Complex structures such as the bacterial flagellum [2], and the blood clotting cascade[3], which were originally poster childs of ID are found to exist in simpler, smaller structures with different/same functions. Given that we have this process which develops the illusion of 'intelligently designed' components, to postulate anything in life is intelligently designed without direct evidence seems prima facie, highly unsound.VI.Conclusion:I hope I have briefly sketched out the case against ID. Note that this positive anti- argument is not needed for me to win this debate, as Pro has the burden of proof. But considering he has yet to make any argument for ID, I have preempt end the gun. Back to Pro!VII. References: [1] http://arxiv.org...[2]http://www.nature.com...[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com...;