“the fine-tuning for life as it exists on Earth is the result of design. “
I have a few improvement suggestions.
“A mere 200 generations since the first metal tool was manufactured, technology has reached the stage when its accomplishments increasingly resemble what would have seemed to our ancestors a form of magic.”
This is a timeline that the creationist camp and the evolution camp can basically agree on, but let’s move it farther back to the mastery of fire, since that’s the main subject.
Evolution says that man, or his proximate ancestors, mastered fire somewhere upwards of 100,000 years ago. So let’s call that 4,000 generations ago.
Young Earth Creationists would place firemaking much more recently, perhaps only a few generations before metal working and other more complicated innovations arose.
Now this discrepancy doesn’t just hold true for the time from mastering fire to mastering metalworking. Evolution posits the same 95,000 year+ gap of no innovation in just about every area of technology. No pottery for 95,000 more years. No brick-making for 95,000 more years. No bow & arrow for 95,000 more years. No domesticating plants for 95,000 more years. Somehow, we learned to make fire, flint blades, and a spear thrower, and this didn’t lead to any further technological revolution, but instead, the most amazing period of absolute stasis in human history.
Creationists reckon we learned to use fire, and then within a few generations also figured out how to use that fire to bake clay into pottery, or distill alcohol, or work metals. There’s no aeons long gap where we have to imagine that generation after generation of fully modern humans, with modern human brains, couldn’t create a single new innovation, even though the most distinguishing feature of humans is that they constantly innovate.
One of these models just doesn’t add up.