> This is 3/4 of the way to admitting that the evidence clearly favors evolution.

I never denied the process of evolution. I made that very clear from the start. The Creator may have indeed created us through a process of evolution. This point is irrelevant to me. My claims were:

1. that abiogenesis is understood or reproducible, and that claim still stands. If you believe it is, that still requires a leap of faith. Anyway we'll just have to wait and see - I wait to meet my creator after death in some form, and you wait for science to resolve the origin of life mechanism. However even if it were resolved, I still say:

2. That even if the Creator created us through a process of evolution (entirely possible), that was intentional, not a series of random mutations. Fermi's paradox is evidence of this, and there is more evidence, like this very article we are commenting on (mystery of life's handedness).

Scientism is the faith that requires you to simply believe that humans are somehow special in their ability to create intentionally, while everything else is random Nature. How does a product of random Nature (you) make any meaningful claim at all? If you’re just a random mutation then everything you say is just random mutations and I don’t see any reason to refute it.

If we use the standard of evidence required in any court of law to establish "intent", evidence such as Fermi's paradox is more than enough to establish that life was "intentionally" created. Again, the points about "how" this creation happened are irrelevant, perhaps by a process of evolution, but certainly not randomly.

Interpreting paleontology and biology as implying intent rather than random modification requires more special pleading. When you dig in, it really looks like random changes, dead ends, silly useless changes, stuff that serves one purpose and then gets repurposed for something else, leftover bits and bobs, and constant recycling of ideas. At best, this requires a creator with an odd mindset, and ends up evidentially indistinguishable from randomness.

The Fermi paradox is barely relevant. How much truth do you really think you can extract from an absence of evidence? Really? Because if lack of evidence of communicating technological civilizations (active in the particular tiny timeslice in which we're paying attention) implies lack of existence of any complex life outside of earth (and yes, you seem to need Earth's complex life to be unique for your argument to work), you've got some real thinking to do about the evidence for God or any other creator, especially after you've admitted their actions are, at best, tricky to distinguish from random chance.

Besides my previous point about reading intention into nature, courts of law are not scientific. Among other differences, they operate in a context where intent is much more likely to be actually present. Why would you even bring that up? Except that it's an old creationist talking point, I guess.