The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Apollo]

What I mean is that you are applying modern economic values to judge whether the universe is well or poorly designed. But you haven't yet established that these are what a designer would be aiming for. 

And "successful design" vs. "failed design" are also human-centric concepts which we apply based on our judgments. The idea that God would have the same standards of judgment that modern liberal bourgeois people have is something you haven't demonstrated yet.

The design argument or hypothesis takes cues from the local environment (planet, solar system etc) and infers design and hence a designer. It's the same with big bang. None of us were present at the moment of big bang but after getting clues and building cosmological models we are quite sure of it.

For the sake of this conversation so far we can have the following picture:

Hypothesis #1: There is a design and there is a designer who designed the universe how it is.

If you take this hypothesis and extrapolate it to rest of the universe you would expect certain things. Why? To gauge the validity of the hypothesis we'd come up with some predictive behavior consistent to design.  Based on this predictive model we look at the universe and try to figure out how is it "designed".  We later find out that universe is isotropic when it comes to cosmological laws of nature. So if those laws are part of the design (and they must be because they are the ones that enforce everything in universe) then you should see the product of such design isotropically too based on such predictive model.

Since laws of nature are isotropic, the consequent design will be isotropic too. What that means is that we will have more or less similar ratio of matter/energy & their interactions, giving rise to more complex structures etc, making design isotropic characteristic of universe and you'll see more matter based designed objects (planets, galaxies, stars etc) than not. Universe would be a consistently "interesting" place rife with design elements than the cold lonely pitch black place that we see.

Hypothesis #2: Empty space with pitch black cold conditions itself is a design
Hypothesis #3: Universe is failure of design because

None of the design arguments we know of presented historically (Movers, watchmaker, guided evolution, irreducible biochemical complexity, fine tuning, so and so forth ) posit #2 & #3 above. They all posit #1. If there is someone who is making an argument based on #2 & #3 above then I'd be interested to know what predictive basis they used to formulate such hypothesis.

Remember, in case of #1 there is predictive basis and that is our observation of nature around us and conjectures based on that observation of patterns and designs.

(Also if you're going to call yourself "Apollo" it would probably be a good idea for you to have some idea of the Apollo/Dionysus contrast. This is kind of fundamental.)

I disagree. A random anonymous name and avatar is better suited for an anonymous forum. I do not expect others to discuss greek mythology here with me. Don't judge a person by the avatar. I could have picked a rocket just the same.

If those things are designed, then they came about by design. If they weren't then they didn't. 
How we interpret them doesn't change whether they were designed or not. We might well be interpreting wrongly. 

Right. But since design arguments posit a position that's the focus of discussion so it's not agnostic position the above statement supposes.

I think you mean that we think we perceive design based on patterns we see in nature, but that these patterns may only look like design based on how our minds interpret things. If that's what you mean then I agree.

 
Yes.