The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Angrboda]

Intelligent creatures can design a great many things but the prerequisite materials must come first.

Nature provides the environment for life to evolve into intelligent creatures.
Intelligent creatures can build items if the prerequisite materials are available.

First, I want to say that intelligence is the only determiner of design that we are looking for. Nature "designing" a river is not what we are after because nature has no intelligence (and arguably we only call things "nature's design" as a metaphorical extension of our own ability to design). So God doesn't have to exist, only intelligence and its possibilities. Secondly, I agree with the prerequisite of materials for human design, and I posed the question to Belacqua: Does simulating matter virtually qualify as designing it? In other words, we cannot create it, but we can simulate it, and the latter is what we mean by designing it.

(And I agree with your description of darkness as a product of perception, not necessarily absence of photons; my goal with the analogy is to show we can understand what it means for something to not be something else.)

Is there anything that an omnipotent god cannot create? Regardless, you seemed to have confused empiricism with simply jerkin' the gherkin.

A virtual simulation need not even have to have been created for the imagining its particulars to count as design. This is why talk of designed objects is bogus. Design describes a mental act. Evidence of design might exist apart from the designer, but if you want evidence of a specific designer then you need evidence of that mental act.