The issue here is what satisfies the conditions that are constitutive of something that is designed. There is an aesthetic there that I think we should not put off. That God created it "good" is, I think a stable ground to work that out. Not sure if that is part of Hart's work Beauty of the Infinite, but it seems to at least point that way.

On the issue of how good ID arguments are, I think it depends entirely on the particular version. Some ID arguments are awful. It would be very bad to conclude from some appearances of design that there's a designer. In other cases, it's not so bad. The fine-tuning argument, for example, is an argument that the range of constants in physics is so narrow that very small variations would not allow rational life at all. Rational life is so important morally and existentially that it seems like a major coincidence that there would happen to be constants within that very unlikely range. The only way around that argument is to posit the existence of every possible set of constants, but there's no other evidence for such a huge number of universes, and it seems to count against Occam's Razor to postulate such a thing, just as it seems to count against it to posit a creator. In the end, if one of the two is required, and we have competing accounts of simplicity by which one or the other might count as a simpler explanation, then I think we have to conclude that the argument isn't all that bad (whereas the versions that deny evolution are going against a simpler explanation and thus fare much worse).

The issue here is what satisfies the conditions that are constitutive of something that is designed. There is an aesthetic there that I think we should not put off. That God created it "good" is, I think a stable ground to work that out. Not sure if that is part of Hart's work Beauty of the Infinite, but it seems to at least point that way.

On the issue of how good ID arguments are, I think it depends entirely on the particular version. Some ID arguments are awful. It would be very bad to conclude from some appearances of design that there's a designer. In other cases, it's not so bad. The fine-tuning argument, for example, is an argument that the range of constants in physics is so narrow that very small variations would not allow rational life at all. Rational life is so important morally and existentially that it seems like a major coincidence that there would happen to be constants within that very unlikely range. The only way around that argument is to posit the existence of every possible set of constants, but there's no other evidence for such a huge number of universes, and it seems to count against Occam's Razor to postulate such a thing, just as it seems to count against it to posit a creator. In the end, if one of the two is required, and we have competing accounts of simplicity by which one or the other might count as a simpler explanation, then I think we have to conclude that the argument isn't all that bad (whereas the versions that deny evolution are going against a simpler explanation and thus fare much worse).

The other issue that a designer makes sense as the best explanation for the ordered structures of reality, I think, makes good sense on an intuitive level. But a closer examination of the structures of reality show that this intuition does not have a good concordance of evidence to support it. Quantum fields appear to be chaotic and rather disordered, it is not the most efficient for humans to be upright, there have been numerous mass-extinctions in the world before human beings existed, and so on. So there are equal reasons to assert that there is either no designer or a designer who designed something very flawed. These are other reasons why purporting the scientific nature of ID is wrong and the philosophical arguments when challenged with the various countervailing evidences become more pourous than ever before.