Is life well designed?

A well-formed system aligns all variables so that anything outside an acceptable result fails loudly, so noticeably that it becomes painfully obvious something unexpected occurred outside the tolerances of the designed system.  There is gravity in a well-formed system that keeps everything operating in a well-tuned manner; so much so that if something resists that gravity, it becomes obvious.  When it operates correctly, it all flows as expected, and each variable answers a need or asks for a need to be met to maintain the system’s harmony.  What happens in a well-designed system: inconsistencies emerge naturally when viewed holistically.

If we apply this to life, do we see it as something that speaks loudly as something carried forward by a bottom-up design without any purpose, a totally undirected series of occurrences that molded itself without any outside involvement at all, or something so well designed that we can spot something anomalous at a glance?

Well designed? A couple of off-the-shelf examples:-

The laryngeal nerve of the giraffe...

The giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) is a famously inefficient nerve pathway, measuring up to 15 feet (4.6–5 meters) long, despite connecting the brain to the larynx (voice box) just inches away. The nerve travels down the long neck to the chest, loops around the aorta, and returns up the neck. 

McGill University +4

That anatomical arrangement is said to derive from our fish ancestors in which the route of the nerve is perfectly efficient.

Bipedalism and childbirth: The relatively recent evolutionary adaptation of our own species to walking upright has created a number of related issues from chronic back pain to greatly increased danger to the foetus as it passes through the restricted birth canal.

The birth canal in human females has had to narrow in order to walk upright since locomotion becomes increasingly inefficient as the pelvic girdle widens.

You are arguing you’d not do it the way it works in a healthy body of a giraffe, so a healthy giraffe living life is not good enough, you want it to suit you in your wisdom? It works, they are healthy, and you are not satisfied with that?

Relatively recent events in an evolutionary adaptation, I’m sure, are just someone else giving what they think happened; it isn’t like someone was actually monitoring these things over time to record them, but a just-so story was thrown out there to make a case.

You're missing the point - it strongly suggests that such an anatomical arrangement is the result of a long process of adaptation, evolutionary change if you will.

Designing such a layout from scratch makes absolutely no sense. Is that your concept of this notional 'designer', one that designs in a way that has no rhyme or reason? You might almost say a "random designer".

Of course 'direct observation' wasn't possible because those evolutionary processes were taking place millions of years before our species even emerged. A rather fatuous objection?

But it is possible to make reliable inferences from what we observe today.

Yes, but you are putting an undeserved spin on things. You are viewing things only as you think they are, based on your assumptions about the past and just-so stories. If we limit our assumptions about the past to the processes we see at work today, rather than assuming something different occurred, a different picture emerges. Life is filled with cells, each an information-processing system, and their variety is diverse yet forms a highly organized system that processes everything so that a doctor can look at the body and see what healthy is and what is not, based on anomalies. There is nothing about that that suggests it emerged from chaos over time, no matter how much time was available.

Scientific endeavour is considerably more than "just-so stories"!

And I've never actually heard a professional scientist suggest that life in all its complexity "emerged from chaos over time". have you?

You disbelieve in design, you believe in an unguided process, totally undirected without interference from an intelligent outside source, correct? You accept billions of years, and it just happened without help against all odds?

I believe in the explanation I find more credible and I find the narrative that some unspecified 'creator-entity' of immense power and ability made all things to be implausible.

What cause do you have to say an unspecified creator-entity did it, instead of one who was involved in creating you while you were in your mother’s womb? You think our creator couldn’t be bothered to know our names, or care that we know Him?

Well now you've gone from what might have been an interesting discussion about the emergence of life and what we can say given our scientific knowledge, straight into full-blown religious doctrine!

You seem to be confused about the distinction between faith-based belief and actual knowledge?

If God created the universe and the only reasonable explanation is God, do you think that would be avoidable? Any other scenario people bring to the table that does not and cannot cover all of the bases would all be in error.

A lot of conditionals there? But you seem to want to have a theological discussion which doesn't particularly interest me because they generally don't go anywhere that I find interesting.

It seems to me you want to avoid it like the plague, which is why you are willing to accept evolution upon imaginary evidence instead of solid evidence based on reality as we know it.

Evolution-deniers are going extinct - irony?

Its evidence not the numbers that matter, the one thing you can only apply just so stories to make it sound like a possiblity not something we can point to today in operation and give credit to for something in the past, while design we can point to and see the whole thing fit into that narrative without problems.

Yes, evidence is vital and it's evidence that's brought the great majority of people around to the acceptance that the theory does in fact explain the variety in living forms that we see.

Even many religiously devout people now accept it.

Is it logical, is there explanatory creative properties that can account for the information directing it all

Much more research is required to establish how life might have emerged from some rudimentary large molecule capable of self-replication.

Contrary to what you believe, the absence of an explanation leads only to a dead-end.