Why is the Intelligent Designer so inept?

Or, he's trying to make it look as though something like modern evolutionary theory is close to the explanation of the origin of the species we see around us.I favour the "devious designers" explanation when we're examining the character of the Intelligent Designer(s), because it automatically fits all the evidence like a glove.So, if I'm right, the real question would be: Why do the Intelligent Designers try and conceal themselves? (The plural is because polytheism would appear to be almost infinitely more likely than monotheism once we take away our cultural bias).Apart from the suggestion of laissez-faire designers who merely design nature, something like Bluejay suggests above(only plural, to remove cultural prejudice ), there would appear to be nothing else that would fit the evidence, except, of course, the parsimonious "no designers" solution, the obvious default position unless or until we have positive evidence for the existence of such beings.

That's the most important sentence in your post, Percy. If there are interventionist designers, then they design within the parameters of evolutionary possibility, and they have to be doing this deliberately.You could have a million designed planets without one giving the appearance of natural causes that this one has. There's absolutely no reason why design should resemble evolution, unless it were designed to do so. There's no necessity for designers to design in nested hierarchies, and no reason why a designed planet should give the impression of having such things.The I.D. people should not blame mainstream scientists for dismissing their ideas about design. They should blame the designers for designing in a way intended to delude observers. They should offer prayers to the designers to help them in their cause:"Dear designers, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy names. Please give us some useful anomalies, either living or fossilized. If we could discover living marsupials in Europe, or rabbit fossils in the Precambrian, it would be a great help to us, the faithful. And please stop sticking transitional-looking fossils all over the place, as they encourage the infidel, as does all this D.N.A. homology."The designers consistently refuse to bless their worshippers with this thing called evidence, strangely. They're so successful at concealing themselves, it's just as if they're figments of their followers' imaginations.

The drawbacks that we have are easily explained by the evolutionary view, and therefore by my theory about the intelligent designers. They bend over backwards to conceal themselves, and give everything the appearance of having natural causes. If we have interventionist designers, their intervention is either so light as to be undetectable, or they design to give the appearance of non-design.So, our back aches are because it's necessary to give the appearance that we became bipeds by an imperfect process of random variation and natural selection in ancestral quadrupeds, and a few intermediate looking fossils have been laid down to encourage the view. In addition, we see clever work in our genomes, like the apparent fusion of ape chromosomes into chromosome 2, for example, and many other features.This theory doesn't tell us why the designers wish to conceal themselves, merely that they do. One prediction is that, if they're completely effective, we'll never see any evidence for them.I think that my theory of omphalism explains all the evidence (but not the motive beyond a desire to be invisible to any careful observers). It can be summed up thus:The designers always design within the parameters of evolutionary possibility, and are therefore undetectable.If this thread assumes an interventionist designer or designers, then I think that my theory is by far the best one. Without the assumption, the evidence also fits a non-interventionist "front-loader" designer(s) of the universe, and, of course, no designers at all (the parsimonious explanation that I prefer as a working basis myself).I suppose we can now enjoy speculating as to why they might make such great efforts to conceal themselves. Over to you, Bluejay!

Have you thought this through, Lucy? Had the designer done a better job when designing Cavediver, then Cavediver would be able to design something better than an idiot robot, wouldn't he?

So far as we can observe, advanced intelligence is a quality of populations rather than individuals. Our kind of intelligence could only evolve and exist in a social animal. Collectively, we're intelligent, but a human without input from others wouldn't exhibit much intelligence.Of course, that needn't apply to the designers. I use the plural just on the basis of probability. We don't know how many designers there are, so pick a number from one to a trillion at random, and we can see that the probability of a lonely designer is slim. Polytheism is far more likely than monotheism, but we come from monotheistic cultures, and tend to use the singular "designer" with ridiculous cultural subjectivity, a bit like those people who believe that God speaks only English!I can't really agree with your speculation on the designers, because the only thing we can know about them is that they want their work to appear as if they didn't exist, and nature produces their designs. We could only learn more about them if they made mistakes, and they don't appear to have, which is why the more conventional schools of I.D. thought can never present evidence.My intelligent design theory is the only one which has as much evidence going for it as evolutionary theory does. (It's the only one with any evidence, in fact). That's because any evidence for evolution backs the theory of designers who want their work to appear to be evolution. I can't go wrong.So your suggestion that the designers appear to favour populations over individuals doesn't really hold out. They must make it appear so, because mutation and natural selection would have that effect, and it's their disguise.