I gave you a clear example -- the thing you're typing on right now. It would have been incomprehensible to the "contemporary rational processes" available to the people of 1000 years ago. And yet computers are clearly not "mystical," they are obviously created. The methods and processes of a hypothetical designer could in the same way be so subtle and advanced as to escape our rational assessments. Again: this line of thought does not work.
After all, we've pretty much figured out the mitochondion, and that's orders of magnitude more complex than a transistor.
Uh huh. You see the irony in your statement, surely. To equate the figuring-out of a designed object, to the figuring-out of an allegedly randomly-formed object, simply points out the problem with your argument. What is it that would tell you the transistor was created? And what is it that tells you that the mitochondrion was not?
This is fun, but I gotta go. Maybe we can pick it up tomorrow.
When you can tell me how the creator came to be created, then maybe you've got a point.
I'll stipulate your hypothetical, and claim that given a computer, Francis Bacon could have figured out in large part how it works, by suitable empirical tests.
The methods and processes of a hypothetical designer could in the same way be so subtle and advanced as to escape our rational assessments.
This is conjecture. More than that, it may be provably wrong. Mathematics, for example, has explored not just the algebra we use in high-school, but the set of all possible algebras. It has looked at the behaviors on N-dimensional spaces, not just the 3 or 4 dimensional spaces we live in. Moreover, I don't buy the idea that we can't distinguish with a high degree of certainty between a bug and a feature without the source code or a knowledge of the mental processes of the programmer.