The problem with intelligent design is...
Well, it doesn't have just one problem. It has a multitude of problems, including proponents who get themselves into trouble. During the Dover trial, for example, Michael Behe suggested that the intelligent designer might be dead.
Another problem is that proponents of intelligent design pick as examples things that work well, like the blood clotting cascade in vertebrates.1 They forget that there are a lot of things that don't work so well. If they're going to have their intelligent designer take credit for the good stuff, then they also have to have her/him take credit for the bad stuff. And as David Attenborough points out, there's some really perverted stuff out there. Here's how Attenborough replies when someone tells him there must be a designer.
Well, it doesn't have just one problem. It has a multitude of problems, including proponents who get themselves into trouble. During the Dover trial, for example, Michael Behe suggested that the intelligent designer might be dead.
Another problem is that proponents of intelligent design pick as examples things that work well, like the blood clotting cascade in vertebrates.1 They forget that there are a lot of things that don't work so well. If they're going to have their intelligent designer take credit for the good stuff, then they also have to have her/him take credit for the bad stuff. And as David Attenborough points out, there's some really perverted stuff out there. Here's how Attenborough replies when someone tells him there must be a designer.
I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in East Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.
1Larry Moran has a long, detailed explanation of the blood clotting cascade showing why it isn't an example of irreducible complexity. Creationism is not so much untestable as wrong. Every time creationists make a definite assertion, it turns out to be false.
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