Detecting design or intent in nature

[watchamadoodle]

That's a question for theists and for us to pull apart. I'm not looking at anything in nature and assume it's designed or suddenly believe it's designed. Why should I?

I suspect I'm thinking about the question wrong, and that's why it seems confusing to me.

Here some disconnected thoughts:

(1) It seems like we would need to know something about the design goals before we can measure the probability of some non-natural engineer (however you define "non-natural" - God, intelligent hominids, etc.)

(2) There is the sharpshooter fallacy to consider. The hypothesis of intelligent design needs to predict some new experimental data - not just "explain" existing data. Of course the new data doesn't need to be future data; it could be newly discovered past data (in the case of archaeology).

(3) I've heard many people say the increasing entropy of the universe indicates a design goal. Does a human have higher or lower entropy than the equivalent mass/energy of microbes?

As you can see, I'm just confused and thinking in circles. I'm sure if I looked at the question in the right way, then it would be simple.