One problem with Plato (I'm reading his Timaeus 1 right now) is that he and everyone in his dialogs presume not only that a `design' requires a `designer', but, more importantly, that only an entity can design, never a process.
The English language favors this `folk belief' by making the usual term for `that which designs' be the word `designer'. This is similar to the construction of `writer' out of `write', of `composer' out of `compose', and `builder' out of `build'.
Originally a person who used a typewriting machine was known as a `typewriter', but that word came to refer to the machine and the person became known as a `typist'.
The notion of a `design process', the concept of a designer that is not a single entity, requires understanding that a process can occur in a group, the members of which differ from one another. Those which are more suited to a set of actions survive and reproduce better than those which are less suited. But for people to understand this, they must begin to think in terms of populations, of multiples.
I suppose that people find it hard to learn to think in terms of a group made up of entities which are not exactly similar to each other. But I find it somewhat amazing that this is the case. After all before more than a few centuries ago, products were never manufactured to be identical and soldiers did not wear `uniforms'.
But rulers did study, or show obeisance, to geometry. In geometry, entities of the same kind are identical, like equilateral triangles.
However, as we can see from the language, the way of thinking could not simply have come from rulers. Instead, I think that people learned to think in terms of an exemplar or typical member of a group. For example, consider a geography that says `the lion lives in Africa.' That phrase is a shorthand for saying `a majority of lions live in Africa.' The term, the `lion', does not refer to a single, particular lion, but to a typical or exemplar lion. The longer phrase reminds you of old raggedy lions, young cubs, and females. The phrase `the lion' does not remind you of the variation, because that is not supposed to be relevant to the topic under discussion, which in this instance is where the major live.
For most people, most of the time, the escape from irrelevancy was worth while.
But variation is relevant. Without variation, a design process without a `designer' cannot succeed. Put another way, if all lions were exactly alike — no cubs, no females, no old males — then the species could not evolve over generations through differential reproduction and survival. There would not be any features that would give advantage (nor mother lionesses).
In any event, many do think of geometry and numbers. The rules for such mathematical entities are not the same as the rules for lions or daisies. For example, unlike lions or daisies, all equilateral triangles are similar. Their shapes remain the same. Only their sizes, orientations, and locations differ. An exemplar, a typical, and a particular equilateral triangle are all identical (for the meaning of `identical' that is considered relevant). But two lions or two daisies will not be identical, even if they have the same size and look in the same direction.
Triangles cannot evolve. Until recently, it was thought that cats and dogs could not evolve either, because a cat could not change into a dog any more than a triangle could change into a square. A general characteristic about change between different types or `species' of polygon was thought to apply to the ancestor of modern cats and dogs.
When you think, as the people in the Timaeus do, about the universe and you believe that every entity, including the universe, needs a `designer' that is not a process, then you are stuck thinking that there must be some entity that designed the universe. That is the conclusion that comes from those premises.
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