What is your scientific specialty? I ask this not to be snobby but to get a feel for how much you know about how much information it takes to assemble new radically different body plans. I can’t think of an analogy that is diverse enough to illustrate the challenge.
The omnipotent designer, as you called him, could have poofed everything into being but chose not to. I can give you my guess why, but it’s not scientific. But whatever happened during those 3 billion years, it didn’t happen without guidance. Assembling gene regulatory networks that actually build something coherent and resilient and functional AND unique multiple times is not going to happen by a random search sifted by selection. There isn’t enough time or selective power. 10-20 myr is peanuts compared to 3 billion years. Chimps and humans diverged 6 mya, rats and mice diverged 20 Mya. Yet we have echinoderms, crustaceans, various worms, priapulids, brachiopods, mollusks, even a primitive chordate in 10-20 myr time. ( I am speaking from memory here, I left out Ctenophora and Cnidaria and Porifera deliberately because they predate the Cambrian.) I am talking about fossil traces, not dates based phylogenetic analysis, which puts their origin earlier, but that is not backed up by fossil evidence.
BTW I doubt Meyer said things poofed into existence anywhere in his book.
I know you don’t like ID. I don’t know who you have encountered before who advocated ID. But not all advocates are the same. We do have rational scientific reasons for what we say. We do research (some of us) and publish papers.
We read the literature. And we publish popular press books, some of us. But then we are not the first to advocate a theory by publishing a popular book… And we are not the first to have a journal to support our work. There is Darwin, for example, and the journal Nature. From Wikipedia:
Janet Browne has proposed that “far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived, born, and raised to serve polemic purpose.” Many of the early editions of Nature consisted of articles written by members of a group that called itself the [X Club] Janet Browne has proposed that “far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived, born, and raised to serve polemic purpose.”[[13]] Many of the early editions of Nature consisted of articles written by members of a group that called itself the [X Club], a group of scientists known for having liberal, progressive, and somewhat controversial scientific beliefs relative to the time period.[[13]] Initiated by [Thomas Henry Huxley], the group consisted of such important scientists as Joseph Dalton Hooker, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall, along with another five scientists and mathematicians; these scientists were all avid supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution as common descent, a theory which, during the latter half of the 19th century, received a great deal of criticism among more conservative groups of scientists.[15] Perhaps it was in part its scientific liberality that made Nature a longer-lasting success than its predecessors), a group of scientists known for having liberal, progressive, and somewhat controversial scientific beliefs relative to the time period.[13]