Now you appear to be asserting that one can only have a concept of something that actually exists.
No, I'm not trying to be that mathematical about it. It's more like a detective surveying a crime scene and talking about possible motives.
In fact, the examples show clearly that life is NOT ordered - it contains a tremendous amount of randomness.
I'm not defining ordered as /= random. Perhaps I should use the word 'purposeful'. Life seems to be purposeful. You will argue that is a squishy sort of term, but if we are to explore the idea of an ID we have to, as best as we can, adopt that assumption and see if it fits the evidence.
After all, chaos is basically the opposite of design/order, right?
No, I don't think so. A design can use chaos where relevant. Watch the floor of the NYSE for instance: It operates under certain rules, but each individual trade is not governed by the central authority, and so trading fits no simple pattern.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't see the connection in your reference to zip drives and DNA. If you think it relevant, please clarify.
No, zip file compression, like 'send to compressed (zipped) folder' under Windows? Perhaps a better illustration would be lossy compression, like MP3. It's been found that certain sounds can be modeled quite compactly by spec'ing frequency and amplitude plus 'noise'. The hiss that accompanies certain consonants or the crash of a cymbal are two examples. So you don't code the entire waveform, just say 'give me some noise within this envelope'. So MP3 uses randomness in it's design, along with more direct encoding. We look at the compact encoding of MP3 as a sign of brilliance, not evidence that it wasn't designed.
Not really. I'm ordinarily not given to that kind of metaphysical navel-gazing.
Well, then, you can use your brain, but not speculate on how it came to be, beyond its purely physical ancestry. To use your brain is to make enormous assumptions about its relevance to the external world. Those who wish to speculate on the genesis or even meaning of the mind must examine those assumptions.
Indeed, I find it ever so much more interesting as a purely natural phenomenon than I would if it was the product of some deity's manipulation.
If I may be able to bring him up again, C.S. Lewis describes having this same emotion. To put it as succinctly as I can think to do, if there is a creator he is of greater complexity and depth than the natural world. The creator is the random number generator, without him you are limiting yourself to a deterministic world. To the extent you don't think nature is deterministic you are a mystic like me.
so far as I know no one has actually demonstrated the existence of "spirit"
There are a whole bunch of people who claim just that. Did you investigate or just discard them out of hand? I'm going to be accused of ascribing 'base motives' again, but if you are truly just an advanced animal, nothing is more likely than that there are all sorts of things about which you have no concept whatsoever. I bet that beautiful dog of yours has never wondered how the universe came to be.