Evidence of Design in the Biological Realm

Yesterday, my friend and I were talking about his recent bout with a cold.  We started talking about all of what was going on in his body in both detecting and fighting this virus.  And all of it happening without him consciously directing the activity – all happening kind of automatically.  I told him that it would be like your car automatically diagnosing and repairing itself while you were driving.  We went on to discuss all of the automatic processes that occur each day in your body, without which you could not live, but which are not controlled or directed consciously by you.  For example, your development from a single cell in the womb to your current developmental stage in life.  Other things we talked about were how your heart pumps blood.  I found this little blurb from PBS on how many times your heart beats:

Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze. You’re using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body.

All of this occurs without you consciously directing it.  That pumping of blood delivers nutrients and oxygen continually to all the parts of your body that need it through and intricate network of veins.  Here is a snippet from Wikipedia explaining this:

The circulatory system also called the cardiovascular system, is an organ system that permits blood to circulate and transport nutrients (such as amino acids and electrolytes), oxygen, carbon dioxide, hormones, and blood cells to and from cells in the body to nourish it and help to fight diseases, stabilize body temperature and pH, and to maintain homeostasis.

The body is vastly complex and highly engineered.  It is not a “god of the gaps” argument to infer design when looking at this marvelous system, with many irreducibly complex, interdependent, sub-systems.  Stephen Meyer talks about a positive cause for intelligent design, where we are looking for causes known to produce the kinds of effects we see in the biological realm.  We rightly acknowledge that an automobile, with all of its complexity must’ve had a designer, even though we don’t necessarily know him.  Why is it unreasonable to assume that the human body, vastly more complex than an automobile, likewise has a designer?