Don2 (Don1 Revised) said:
You are making an intelligent design argument through implication. Do you really think ID is valid?
1. He is not doing that, as the evidence is vastly stronger for one than the other. Purely for example, I will mentioned one big difference - but they're so different that this is merely a small example -:
In order for the existence of the universe we observe to increase the probability of design by a creator with properties P, Q, R in a significant manner - so that the ID argument works in that sense -, P, Q, R need to be specified in ways that make the prior of the existence of such creator astronomically low - so much so that the hypothesis of creation by that kind of creator remains very improbable even after considering the ID evidence. On the other hand, the probability of existence of virologists with the power to manipulate viruses is almost 1 (1 for all intents and purposes). Now if we could properly assign probability almost 1 to the existence of an entity who has the power to create universes, often does it, and really likes the very features we find in ours
before we make the ID argument, i.e., before we factor in the features of our universe, then those features may very well provide the bases for a good argument to the thesis that our universe was indeed created by one such being, that is barring other difficulties that might or might not be present. But we can't - again, we can establish the existence of virologists with the relevant powers and dispositions
before considering the properties of the virus that B20 mentioned.
2. Validity is a property of deductive arguments. ID arguments are arguments in the sense of 'arguing a case', and may or may not contain faulty logic. Some may contain only correct logic - so, no invalid arguments involved -, and terribly bad priors.