Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me such a beautiful piece of clay to work with.
If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was around 400 BC, you, being an educated fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Pythagoras then?"
If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was circa 100 BC, you, being a clever and worldly fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Eratosthenes then?"
If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was the 1400s and you were friends with sailors or were yourself a sailor, you might say, "well, then why do the sails appear before the ship on the horizon?"
If I said, "the world is flat!" and it was the 1600s, you would think I was an idiot, because by now Magellan's voyage was well known and trade had begun to circle the globe, so you might just bite your thumb at me or ignore me.
But if I say, "the world is flat!" and you say, "citation needed", that is the stupidest possible "skeptical" response.
See, I'm not saying it's wrong to ask for a citation for a questionable claim. I'm saying that we should do better than that -- a request which you are arguing so vehemently against that, by now, if you actually were interested in whether or not "the design can be flat!", you could have come up with some examples to argue with.
Every time you, or anyone, says merely "citation needed" without further thought or consideration or argument or inquiry or contradictory evidence, what you are actually doing is holding an enormously loud sign which says, "I am not smart or curious enough to ask you a good question about this, but I am suspicious of it anyway."
If you are claiming something, than the burden is on you to provide us with evidence. Not on us.
And, in case of your example, "citation needed" is the most valid answer in XXI century, when your claim goes against all common scientific knowledge. Saying anything more is not intellectual laziness, it's a waste of energy. Burden of proof, again, lies on you.
