Intelligent Design: Did you design yourself?

[Heywood]

The atheists will be the ones needing to justify the claim that our lineage is the results of natural processes.

No, the ones who claim that there is a way to tell natural lineages apart from artificial ones will be the ones needing to justify.

Just as they are now.

If you think there is a way to tell them apart, particularly given the limitations of what we know about current lineages, then show it.

Otherwise, you have a hypothesis that you can't back up with evidence or reasoning. Mere speculation.

Implied in your counter argument, the portion I bolded, is a claim. You are claiming natural lineages of life exists. If your counter argument is going to carry any weight, you need to justify this claim first.

My argument is we don't know if our lineage of life is the result of intelligent design(which we know exists) or some naturally occurring process(which we don't know if it exists).

How do we determine what is intelligently designed and what isn't? By personal experience. If we find a piece of machinery on the surface of pluto when the New Horizon probe flies by, we will know it is the product of intelligent design because in our experience we have only observed machinery coming into existence via intelligent design.

If we observe intellects intelligently designing new lineages of life, and never observe new lineages of life coming into existence via some natural process. That gives us cause to categorize all lineage of life, even the ones to which we are not privy to their creation details, as being intelligently designed.

You asked me to tell you how we tell designed things from undersigned things....and I told you.....by experience. If the kind of thing we are looking at only comes into existence via intelligent design....its a pretty good bet something we find of that thing....was intelligently designed.

---

Very well.
I applaud your effort. It is a good one, for sure.

But it's still a shifting of the burden of proof.
It rests on the fact that humans have designed and built some life form.
Humans are the only evidence of "intelligent designers" that you are presenting.
So then you propose that there were humans before there were humans in order to design those humans, huh?
Oh, but that can't be, so it must have been something else... dinosaurs?... nah... they were lizards! so something else... hey, we have this book here...

If you want us to accept that there is an intelligent designer, you must present one, only then you may show that that designer was responsible for designing life on Earth.
Until then, natural causes are all we have to work with. Theories exist, one has shown remarkable resilience to new evidence, so it has become accepted. The details are still being ironed out, but you can't trump your wishful thinking all over that theory.

If the burden of proof is shifted it is because of a change in circumstance. Further I do not need to show you the intelligent designer. All I need to do is make the case that something falls into the category of being intelligently designed. If that thing falls into the category of being intelligently designed, it is strong evidence of an intelligent designer.

If you find a watch on the beach, you don't need to see the maker in order to know there was one. Your counter argument fails.