Life is Intelligently Designed

I am arguing that life was designed by some intelligence. The difficulty in making this argument is that I don't know exactly what intelligence is. It is perhaps easier to start by saying what intelligence is not: It is not a purely physical thing. If our thinking were purely physical, we would be machines. We would be analogous to a computer, which, no matter how complicated the program, is only executing finite state logic of the sort "If A and/or B, then C". A machine can only be reactive - it can never change matter, except by deterministic reactions to deterministic stimuli. Action/reaction, deterministic cause/effect - that's the physical world. Intelligence is something else. Intelligence is *about* the physical, not just a reaction to it. And true intelligence can change the physical, for no physical reason. I can decide to type letters here, and they get typed - not because of what I ate for breakfast, but because I *want* to do it. And if we humans do not have intelligence, then we cannot have a true debate either, so a presumption of the existence of a metaphysical reality called 'intelligence' is a prerequisite of having this debate. So, my position presumes a dichotomy, an ancient dichotomy that most of mankind has always recognized - the distinction between mind and matter. And I am here claiming that life, while formed of matter, must have been originally conceived by mind. The conception might be far removed from life - if one buys a factory made watch from Wal-Mart, the original designer may be quite unknown and his direct input impossible to trace, yet no one would argue that the watch is designed. There are two reasons to suppose life has a designer: One, it bears features common to things known to be designed, and secondly, there are no demonstrable physical causes that could by themselves have produced life as an effect. Here are a few of the traits of designed things: Purpose: Try to step back and imagine a lifeless earth and a lifeless universe. Now ask yourself: "Why should life exist?". Is there any tendency in the laws of nature towards life? Apparently not, since all else that we can observe through our telescopes is barren. No, the rock of Gibralter is surely as fit to survive as the human race is, maybe more so. There is an obvious physical reason why things fall to earth, but no physical reason for life to exist. So it is logical to guess that the purpose of life comes from the mind realm, not the physical. Somebody *wanted* there to be life on earth, and that's why there is life. Un-natural forms: If you find a rock in the (American) woods in a certain shape, you will know right off that you have found an Indian arrowhead. Why? Because rocks do not form in that shape naturally. It is sort of begging the question to ask if life can be a natural form, but I would argue that it is not. I argue that it is not because no one has ever observed nature spontaneously forming life. At one time scientists thought it did, btw, but learned that microscopic eggs were getting into things, it wasn't abiogenesis at all. So this leads to the other side of my argument: There is no demonstrable means by which life could have arisen naturally. Technically, you couldn't demonstrate a natural means, since demonstration requires intelligence, but I'd certainly accept pseudo-random demonstrations of the origin of life. But, of course, no such demonstrations exist, and not for lack of trying! No, the complexity of even the simplest single-celled lifeforms is beyond the scope of current technology to synthesize by ANY means, much less experiments intended to simulate the random activity of a sterile planet. So, I think that lays out the basic case for design, so I'll leave it at that for an opening salvo.