> The most striking characteristic of a randomly designed
> system is that you cannot restart it. Once you shut it off
> it dies permanently.
I don't see how that is a consequence of the underlying design principle. There are many organisms that survive de-facto death through freezing etc. You could also engineer machines to not be restartable, and under certain circumstances that may be a desirable feature. There's no connection between what you call rational or irrational design and restarting.
Moreover, there are natural mechanisms with "sensible" design. To me, the mammalian retina is very carefully calibrated, perfectly understandable machinery implementing various filters and feature extraction networks. Examples abound.
Yes saying it is that random is like to expect nature to build a complex organism like us by only being like a monkey typing randomly on the keyboard of chemistry, physics etc... and be able to create that.
Even if it was the case then the earth would be full of defective cells to animals across the whole tree of life with only a few working well. It's not what we find when we mine the earth or what we have today.
But even still with a "keyboard" that complex.. You will need more than billions of years to accomplish something that complex randomly.
Moreover, there are natural mechanisms with "sensible" design. To me, the mammalian retina is very carefully calibrated, perfectly understandable machinery implementing various filters and feature extraction networks. Examples abound.