I’ve been thinking about this particular argument a lot recently.
So I know a number of artists, scientists, engineers, etc. I have also followed the work of many more. Something I notice about all of them, though… while they all have very distinctive styles of design, and each one of those distinctive styles has its own basic structure, a kind of… well, *skeleton that each artist or scientist or whoever uses as the base of their design. Each designer’s work is different from others’ work, but their own pieces share this basic structure., whatever it happens to be for that creator. For artists, even though their work can be about vastly different subjects and come from different points in their life, there are basic stylistic elements that are present in every work, even if they know it or not. Dali’s paintings, for example, can look very, very different, but still when you know his art, you can still see new paintings that you haven’t seen before and guess that it’s him. You may not even necessarily know why you know, but you do (if you know art or his work, that is).
What is my point here? Well, the word “design” in the “intelligent design” phrase bothers me. We have a huge number of organisms on this planet, some of them “designed” so differently from others that some assume they came from other planets. Jellyfish are nothing like orchids are nothing like crocodiles are nothing like tulips are nothing like dogs. Even the differences between different mammals - humans sweat, dogs pant, and mice and rats have to put their tails and feet on a cold surface to cool off. Why would one creator do something so vastly different and also vary its creations’ abilities to do things it seems the creator wants us to be able to do. We are so different that it is obvious we weren’t “designed” by the same being, we weren’t even actually designed.
*it’s the best word I have been able to come up with so far.