Avram HaIvri amazes me every time מחדש with his ability to combine arrogance with shallowness.

I replied to him with the following, for the public benefit:
Well, maybe you’re a great expert in the Bible (I don’t know), but in philosophy (or whatever you want to call a discussion like this), you’re really talking nonsense. In light of that, the confidence and arrogance dripping from your writing are hard for me to understand.
I’ll address your arguments briefly; unfortunately I probably won’t be able to respond, certainly not in the next few days:

1) You wrote: "But even a quick glance at the diagram on the left makes it clear that both sides share exactly the same problem—except that the religious outsourced it: while atheists admit through gritted teeth that at present we have no scientific answer to this question, the religious transferred the problem to an external factor: God." That is of course incorrect. To say that everything has a cause leads us into an infinite regress. Therefore the claim is that at least everything that was created has a cause, except for some first link that was not created. This was agreed even by those who argued for the eternity of the world, and the eternity of the world is exactly the solution to the creator problem. But once it was discovered that the universe is not eternal, the need arises to add a prior link—and to stop there.

2) You wrote: "The main problem religion (any religion) has with evolution is not what is in the diagram, but what is not in it. Religion tends to grasp time as an ‘arrow’ progressing toward some purpose (the coming of the Messiah / Jesus / the Mahdi, whichever comes first), but in the process in the diagram the two key components are missing."
A) "Creature 1.1 is not more ‘advanced’ than creature 1 or 1.2—it simply survived to tell the tale"—that is simply begging the question. Maybe the primitive religious believer you present rejects evolution, but evolution in itself does not negate progress in some direction. And of course there is also a dilemma argument here: if the fact that we arrived at such a complex creature as a human being with tremendous intelligence is a result that would emerge with high probability in an evolutionary process, then by definition an evolutionary process is a process with a direction; natural selection, which filters out non-surviving creatures, causes the development of complex creatures as well. If so, even if the religious person does not accept evolution, evolution itself could fit perfectly well with there being a designer of the process, who created the laws within which a process takes place that leads with high probability to complex creation.
And if the fact that we arrived at a complex creature is a rare result even within an evolutionary process, then again there is rare progress here, which the believer will of course claim reflects intervention by God, who wanted to arrive at man and was not satisfied with bacteria, and therefore set the initial conditions very precisely so that complex creatures would develop from them.
B) "Purpose—yuck! The evolutionary process has no purpose at all—it is simply a process that occurs along the time axis"—??? Who said the evolutionary process has no purpose? (Begging the question… do you notice what you’re writing?) What does the fact that it happens on a time axis have to do with anything (like every process, by the way… quite a revelation)? The question is whether at the end of it someone intended to reach a purpose by means of evolution. A stone flying through the air is also a process that takes place over time, and yet the question remains whether someone threw it intending to achieve some purpose, or whether it was blown by the wind. Any process in the world can occur in order to achieve some purpose. And if the process is rare and special, then it is plausible that someone wanted it and planned it.

3) As for the criticism against Rabbi Michael Abraham, I’m honestly embarrassed even to respond. In his book he explicitly sets out to establish the existence of a deistic God and not the God of Judaism, so what exactly are you accusing him of? That he hasn’t yet written a book about the God of Judaism? (By the way, he is writing a book about the God of Judaism now.)
If he proved that there is some entity that created or governs the world, even if it is just some entity (and not necessarily a yellow demon), even if it is not certain that it is one, then he has in fact proved that atheism is false. That is a fairly respectable goal, and not the modest one you try to portray.
You wrote: "He holds that if there is an intelligent designer, then there is a purpose to creation—and that purpose is none other than man!" He explicitly wrote that the physico-theological proof does not claim there is a purpose in creation, certainly not that man is the ‘crown of creation.’
I laughed myself to death when I saw that your problem with man being the ‘crown of creation’ is this: "The trouble is that this very outlook led quite a few scientists and intellectuals alike to accuse Judaism—together with its wayward daughter, Christianity—of the ecological disaster that Western civilization has brought upon the world"… indeed, a mighty objection.
In any case, I expanded on this point in my article on the argument from design, and I’ll quote it here:
"This is the place to address a common mistake, namely, that the physico-theological argument includes the claim that the whole universe was created for life.
Against this understanding, atheists point to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the universe does not support life, and therefore it cannot be that it was all created for life (and consequently the argument for the existence of God collapses).
A close look shows that this claim is not in the argument at all. The argument only says that someone wanted to create life / special laws of nature, and beyond that it says nothing whatsoever about the universe. To make this clear I’ll give an illustration (even if somewhat wild) showing that the argument does not say the universe was created for life.
It may be that God made a wager with Satan over who could create a bigger universe. God prepared the singular point for expansion, and just before it happened decided that if He was already creating a universe, then at least it should not be entirely desolate; there should be one interesting point in it. So He tuned the physical constants so that they would allow for and produce life, and from there the life-supporting universe spread, and eventually life developed in it.
Now the physico-theological believer comes and argues that because of the special nature of the laws of physics, it is proven that someone tuned them. Such an argument does not assume at all that the universe was created for life. The universe can have an independent reason for existing (the wager with Satan), and life can have a side-purpose (creating something interesting in our desolate universe).
This example proves that a physico-theological claim does not necessarily include the claim that the universe was created for life, and therefore we have entirely removed all the puzzlement about the universe’s enormous size relative to the amount of life in it (from the standpoint of the argument).
The physico-theological argument claims nothing beyond this: that life (or the special laws that lead to it) was created by some intelligent being intentionally in order to create life. The argument does not even say that there was a reason for this act of creation, and in our terminology, we claim only the existence of an internal purpose in the creation of life.

But even if someone claims that the whole universe was created for living beings, he is not doing so on the basis of an a priori claim (that the universe looks as though it was entirely created for life), but from tradition or from verses, and so a refutation based on the improbability of such a thing doesn’t really change much.
If God reveals Himself to me and tells me that He created the entire universe only so that Yossi from Ashdod can play soccer every Tuesday, then as long as I trust God, I don’t care about the size of the universe relative to Yossi, since there is no obstacle at all to God truly creating the whole world for the sake of Yossi from Ashdod’s soccer games."

4) You wrote a series of objections: "Is it plausible that an intelligent designer would need 15 billion years to create man?
Is it plausible that after so much effort, the intelligent designer would destroy hundreds of thousands of the crown of his creation (=man) in natural disasters + tens of millions in plagues, every X years?
If we go back a bit in time, is it plausible that the intelligent designer would destroy most of what he built every X years? (See, for example, the Wikipedia entry ‘mass extinction.’)
And if we go even further back in time, could the intelligent designer not have found a safer method than genetic differentiation, which is full (relatively speaking) of errors and mutations, changes randomly without explanation, and along the way produces about 95% ‘genetic garbage’?
And the decisive question—the most common species in the world is the beetle; why דווקא that disgusting creature?!?!…"

Even if that is not a priori likely (say the chance is 1 in a thousand, meaning only one out of a thousand creators would create man in this way), still, a posteriori (after we see a complex, special, and rare world like ours), that tiny probability becomes very high, because the alternative is far smaller than it (the chance of getting a world like ours is much smaller than 1 in a thousand). Conditional probability—it’s really not that hard.
So too, if we found a factory that manufactures pure gold watches by means of an assembly line moving at a speed of 0.0000001 meters per second, so that it takes two years to produce a watch, and at the end of the assembly line it crushes them one by one, burns them, and throws them into the sea, we would still assume there is a designer of the factory, even though the probability that a factory manager would do such a thing is negligible. (Out of tens of thousands of factories whose manager wants the product to continue existing, there is only one manager who wants to destroy his products at the end of the assembly line, for no rational reason, just for fun.) True, the chance that such a manager exists is negligible, but compared to the chance that such a factory arose on its own, it is greater by billions, and by conditional probability (given that such a strange factory is already before us), the chance that there is a manager and designer for the factory and that it did not arise randomly is almost 100%.

As for the “refutations” of the watch analogy:
A) The modern watch was not designed all at once, but in a clearly evolutionary way that took hundreds of years. – ?? So what? A refutation is supposed to be relevant. The watch is also made of metal and man is not, so what? That is precisely what Rabbi Michael Abraham’s book was written to show: that the fact that this is evolution changes nothing. The analogy to the watch is meant to isolate one and only one point: when there is something special and rare, we infer a designer. I expanded on this in my second article; see here: https://rationalbelief.org.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%94%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%97%D7%94-%D7%94%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%95-%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%AA/

And see also my first article, which together with the second removes several of the refutations of the physico-theological proof and sheds new light on it:
https://rationalbelief.org.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94-%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/

B) "Not one watchmaker created the modern watch, but dozens of people." So if I had compared man to an inscription in the desert (written by one person), everything would be fine?! I already wrote above that the analogy is meant to isolate a certain point. By the same token, you could have written: "The watch was made over two weeks, therefore the world was also created within two weeks"—a very high level of argument indeed…

Why is it that in 2018, when humanity is so educated, we still have to deal again and again with such bizarre and worn-out refutations of this argument?

As for the polytheistic conclusion, again this is an accusation against Rabbi Michi for not having written a book about the subjects that interest you. The trouble is, he doesn’t work for you, and not everything he publishes is because he has nothing to say on the matter; besides, as I already said, he is writing books on this issue these days.

Wow, wow, you’re bored.
Now you’ll also have to answer his response, and so on and so forth.

Why bored? Is that how you see everyone who responds to arguments? Not very mature.

No, that’s how I see anyone who responds to people with whom there’s no point in arguing.

I don’t know him well enough; maybe you know better than I do.