Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[Mudhammam]

That's not design at all.  But the only truth that neurons, or any other part of our apparatus, must be aware of is a statistical one-- that this form or that behavior leads to a persistence in information over individuals over time.

Very much of how we think is designed to filter out truth in favor of utility.  That's why optical illusions work.

Of course, it is trial and error. The ability to detect when we are being deceived, even if it takes a thousand years, is a perfect demonstration of how evolution works. Intelligence that has the ability to analyze its surroundings is going to decipher those instances in which an illusion is present rather quickly or perish, if the consequences are dire; otherwise, the deception will persist until some revelation occurs for reasons that, in so far as survival is concerned, are trivial. Hence,

Ignorance of the need to run away from a lion is dangerous.  Ignorance of the fact that 99.999999% of everything we see is empty space probably is not dangerous.  Therefore, we run from lions, and have trouble grasping that our desks are as empty as the solar system is.

The evolution of intelligence has evidently created entire new types of contests for Darwinian principles of selection to get to work. 100-200 thousand years ago, say, human beings were competing with each other and other hominids, at which point learning how to outsmart a lion became of one their least worries. It became, "How do I avoid enemy tribes that are strategizing to burn down my village, kill all the males, and rape all the women?" It is no coincidence that technological breakthroughs are often related to a (literal) arms race. The same is true with intelligence and the necessity of acquiring new knowledge. That it just so happened to lead us to the irrelevant -- again, in so far as survival is concerned -- discoveries about the origins of the universe, subatomic particles, art, literature, or anything else, were determined by causes that are in essence no different than those that drove us to run away from beasts of prey, or taught us that sex is both useful and fun.

I'd look at it like this: our arbitrary judgments are skewed by our nature, and beauty is a description of one of the experiences which are dependent on our nature.  It is because people are naturally inspired by sunsets that we call sunsets beautiful, not because there is something intrinsically beautiful in them.

Ok, but you kind of sound like you're just replacing "intrinsically beautiful" with "naturally inspiring" while I'm more inclined to see these as two different and equally true descriptions of our experiences in a world that imposes its properties on minds -- and that it designed in consequence of physical laws, including natural selection -- rather the other way around.