The argument against Intelligent Design isn't that it's not possible, it's that there isn't any supporting evidence for it. The context is a neutral universe, in the sense that the chemical mix of the sea is a neutral medium for the life that's in it.
The logic of ID gets stacked on some shaky to non-existent premises, primary being the complexity of things like the mammalian eye, or the way things in the living biota fit together. That these intricate phenomena couldn't be produced accidentally.
This is refuted easily and with a great deal of irritation by the champions of rationalism, sometimes known as rational-positivists.
There's an assumed context there as well, of a neutral intellectual medium out of which the arguments emerge. That's provably false, the intellectual context of the present came right out of centuries of tightly-controlled archiving and dissemination of knowledge. Galileo and Copernicus being only the most prominent figures to have their work and discoveries hushed up and tucked away. It's not scientific to presume about these things but I think it's safe to say there were others we don't even have a record of, and with that there's a kind of catalog of the possible that was never made - those who didn't even get far enough to be censored and condemned, because of the intellectual climate of their time.
So current understanding and knowledge are not only partial as a result of the step-by-step progress of human learning proceeding from ignorance and superstition, but partial as a result of the at least sporadic if not continuous agenda-biased selection of knowledge and censoring of its discoverers.
The assumption that idea creates generally is that anything that contradicted church dogma would have been suppressed - a fairly black-and-white process, but it doesn't seem too farfetched to consider that there may have been a more complicated handicapping of human intellectual progress, at least within the last say thousand years.
But for that to be accurate enough to accept we'd have to have an accurate picture of the censoring institutions, and we don't.
We know the Roman Empire collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, and we know the Christian Church by the end of that millennium was essentially the sole repository of what little scientific records there were. That makes it logical to assume that the passage of archived knowledge was filtered by social chaos and the abilities of the monks and a few others who managed to preserve some books and documents.
After that it was the Church's responsibility, and prerogative, to decide what was acceptable and retained and what wasn't.
Until the Enlightenment, which is why that time is looked to as the true beginning of modern science, when the decentralized, lateral accumulation of knowledge made possible an exponential and exponentially-increasing gathering of scientific facts, provable and demonstrable, by reproducible experiments.
It goes directly against the scientific method to assert the unprovable as fact, that's the heart of the argument against creationism. But I'm saying there's likely to be something a little less like incompetence and a lot more like intentional control behind the constriction of progress around morally important knowledge like the origin of life and the greater context in which life is lived. I can't prove it, but I think that's what's happened.
The first place I'm diverging from the scientific consensus is the neutral background assumption.
Starting from that given, that we have these complex minds, and given all the other wonders and beauties of organic life, and the so-far undisproven assertion that it all rose up out of the flux of matter, by accident or inevitably but without intention - how preposterous is it to say that on an infinite scale both spatial and temporal, which is the context here, the true context, the actual background against which we have existence; given also that every aspect of this local complexity is driven by a minute and relatively trivial amount of solar radiation falling on this one small planet from one small star out of the billions and billions we know exist in this one locality, that the unimaginable amounts of energy in play in that greater, infinite context might have given rise, I want to say must have given rise, to something we might as well call divine, whether or not it has any of the attributes our religions accord it.
This has no direct bearing for or against the tenets of organized religion, but it should have a modulating influence on the unspoken but tacit assumption in the scientific view of human centrality in what is without proof taken to be an empty and essentially lifeless void. Because at the same time science seems to be offering the prospect of our being here within an expanse that makes us less than fleas in an ocean of matter billions of light years across, it doesn't refute the permissive nature of isolation in that view. If there's no one here but us, no one more important than us, then whatever we say and whatever we do is valanced only against our own intention and desire.
It's an error of perspective I think, the magnitude into which our instruments and conjectures are proceeding like Xeno's arrow, proceeding into what can only be known piece by piece and step by step, but is already there complete and whole, and as big as everything, because it is everything. All the confident and almost smirking announcements of limits revealed, quarks or muons or some new next thing below and within them, and then the flexible vague reconfigurings of plasma and string at the outer macro-boundaries of the tangible, but in all of it the laborers at discovery unable, forbidden really, to speak of the limitlessness inherent in these simple but not nearly as substantial and permanent, and nowhere near as universal as we've led ourselves, or been led to assume, vertices of time and space.
It looks more and more to me to be likely that there has been a concerted and intentional effort to keep the freshly wondering mind convinced of its insignificance and at the same time convinced of its isolation, so that the self is confirmed as all - that we're here, and that here is nothing without us in it.
An apotheosis of the self.
It seems obvious that what we experience as time and space are local phenomena, real but not complete, and more a function of our presence and passage through them than fundamental attributes of what it is we live within. That way of describing it leaves out what must be an infinite reach of complexity within us as well, but the language and the traditional descriptions make it hard to phrase that inclusively without a lot of writing around the idea.
A simplified version would be that if the argument against creationism is that the random coming-together of molecules over time is all the explanation we need for the complexity and beauty of the life we know is here, that we live, then it's almost inevitable given the infinitely greater amounts of those ingredients - raw matter and time - in the universe, and the universe of universes and so on infinitely out and in, that something equal to its scale would arise. Infinite and eternal.
Science is held to the known and the knowable - by its nature it will never be complete. But what it seeks to know is already complete. Everything, whatever it is, is already there. Here.
The real task of religion is not control and a kind of domestication of its congregations but conversation, communion, with what that is.