Is Intelligent Design a Rational or Irrational belief (5)

I look forward to the upcoming rounds. I will be taking the position that Intelligent Design is an irrational belief and for one simple reason: there is no evidence to believe an Intelligent Designer exists or has ever existed in the past. You and I could, hypothetically, sit around and attempt to fathom all sorts of imaginative theories for the origin of the cosmos or life. 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 (and, of course, the burden of evidence does lie on the shoulders of the ones asserting a claim). You mentioned the complexities of the human body as evidence for an Intelligent Designer. This would be the classic Watchmaker analogy, the same 19th century argument which was refuted relatively shortly after its publication. As the analogy goes, if a person were to trail the sands of a beach and come across a golden pocket watch, he or she should easily be able to deduce that it had an intelligent designer (the watchmaker) because of its intricate, purposeful parts. And by that same token, one should be able to look at the complexities of the cosmos and life and deduce there is an intelligent, sentient entity who created the universe (i. e. , a deity, the ultimate watchmaker). 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. Not to mention we can actually track down the designer and have a conversation with him or her if we so wished. We don't seem to have that same luxury with the Intelligent Designer you are asserting. ). 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. 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, but of course we know it takes an intelligent and sentient being to produce paper. As your next point, you mentioned the constants of the universe and the natural laws, asserting that "were these constants or quantities to be altered by a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed and life would not exist", as if we lucked out on them having the values they do, and perhaps we did. But adding an Intelligent Designer to the equation in no way satisfies this supposed enigma, for that Intelligent Designer would also have its characteristics purely by chance. 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. So far, you have given this Intelligent Designer a few distinct characteristics, and there is no reason to believe they couldn't have been very different without being detrimental to its physical (or metaphysical) existence: 1) It is highly intelligent. 2) It is capable of creating everything in the universe. 3) It, for one reason or another, wanted to create the universe and life. If you believe this Intelligent Designer has always existed (as I believe the universe has always existed), then 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.