Nature's Laws

[Esquilax]

I don't claim to have the ability to comprehend what it might be like to "know nothing about it."  I can, therefore, only respond to the "knows something" state of affairs.  If nature builds machines, my ability to (slightly) understand the concept of teleonomy tends to make me ask, where does this plan, purpose, and know-how come from?  I'm just taking note of the well observed fact that machines always seem to require a planner who has a purpose.  

But you haven't demonstrated that naturally occurring organisms are machines. You've made an analogy, pointing out some broad similarities between man-made machines and organic structures, but that's hardly surprising; a lot of the machines people build imitate nature in some way (I doubt the idea for wings on planes came out of nowhere, for example). Moreover, arguments from analogy do nothing at all to actually prove the premise at the heart of them, they simply seek to draw connections; I can draw an analogy between the flight of manned aircraft and bird flight, that doesn't mean that birds are mechanical and have turbines, nor that manned aircraft are made of birds. I'd have to go a whole lot further, including actual evidence in support of the similarities at my conclusion, before anyone would be justified in accepting that argument. Similarities in part do not necessarily extend to the totality of either set.

Playing around with definitions rarely gives one a pathway to truth. "I can analogize organisms to machines, therefore organisms are machines," is a ridiculous claim to make, because I can also analogize organisms to, say, M&Ms, but that doesn't mean that organisms are candies. At best, what you've done is created two categories, one filled with artificial machines that require designers, and one filled with organic machines that may not. In fact, why did you stop at "machines" in your argument? Because it's equally true that we've only ever observed artificial devices being designed, and not organic entities, isn't it? Doesn't that mean, by the same logic that runs your argument, that you have no observational reason to expect that organisms require designers?