Then, lets just call it creator, as i named it 'intelligent creator' merely because i wanted to emphasize the idea of a creator that did so with intent, not a gush of wind or a person stumbling a cup of milk off the table creating the milky way.
A least a gust of wind or a person stumbling over a table actually make some concrete claims about the 'how' and the 'what'. The nebulous 'creator' does neither.
Yes, none of this is new. They're fairly basic questions to ask in fact, which is why it shocks me to no end how so little people actually gave them any thought. And with how much different people keep bringing up besides-the-point things that do nothing to adress the fundamental question posed, i can't help but think they haven't come up with ways of disproving such arguments.
That's because, as I've already explained more than once, broad nebulous statements are nigh impossible to disprove because they make very few claims you can actually test. People don't bother trying to 'disprove' them, because firstly it's a fool's errand and secondly because the burden of proof lands on the person making the wild claim, not the sensible person asking 'what makes you think that?'
...we should very well be able to sense when something was the result of design or not.
Should we? Is that just an innate ability we carry around?
In the case of the universe, the most common brought up element is 'chance'. The chances of things happening in such a way, in such a order, that it would form an intelligent life capable of pondering all the things we are pondering now, are very very very impossibly very low - or so they say. Wouldn't that suggest an element of intent behind the universe? The intent to create such beings in the first place? Much like how chaotically throwing rocks in the wind won't build a stonehenge, that such would require someone consciously building one.
At last! Here we are. The terrible, already well-addressed arguments you're hoping to dazzle us with. "What are the chances?! What I ask you are the chances of all this happening so perfectly?" The chances are dismally, unimaginably low - so low that almost no-one would think it would happen. However, being that we live in a universe of around 40
trillion stars, you can count on unlikely things happening all the time. Supernovae, for example, are incredibly rare occurrences, but because the universe is so large, if you look up into a single spot of sky, any night of the week (with a really good telescope), you'll probably catch a few.
It just so happens that in this vast universe, over a span of thirteen billion years, the unlikely balance that supports life has come about and - wouldn't you know it - in the places where life could emerge, it just so happens that it
has emerged. And even then, the conditions weren't perfect, or fixed, life itself had to adapt to endure.
In video game parlance, the spawn rate is impossibly low, but if the game world is big enough and you play for several billion years, eventually you'll get the drop. And, lo, you also invoked the 'benevolent intent' versus 'pure chaos' dichotomy again, when we know that life on Earth is best explained by an accumulation of natural occurrences driven by natural laws, including - in the case of biological life - the rather more deterministic process of natural selection.
'It can't all just be random chance' is literally the crappiest, laziest, layman's argument in this particular field of debate. The kind of objection that only occurs to people who really don't understand what is being proposed by methodological naturalism; in physics, chemistry, geology, evolutionary biology, and hundreds more; by people who think that the TL;DR for vast and mind-bogglingly complex areas of scientific study is 'shit happens, I guess'.
Of course, as an atheist myself, i have my own counterarguments to such positions... but i have no intentions of making your life any easier
Honestly, you couldn't have made it any easier than dropping the 'fine-tuning' argument on me. There are genuinely difficult questions to wrestle with in science that really are very, very hard to answer. Yours is a layman's argument that presumes the goings-on of an almost infinitely vast universe, filled with trillions of bodies, in existence for billions of years is comprehensible to the basic logic of stones being scattered by the wind or stacked by hand. Honestly, take a step back, it's laughable. Even more so in consideration of the fact that you've wondered aloud in this thread why nobody has thought up counterarguments to these points when in reality they already have - it's just that you never bothered to read them.