Listening to George Gilder on NPR today as he blathered on about how the compound eye *proves* there is an intelligence behind our origins, followed by Richard Dawkins amusingly tearing his arguments to pieces, and then turning on his radio audience, advising them to "go away and read a book" made me understand just why so many otherwise rational souls buy into Intelligent Design.

Sadly, it appears that the people most qualified to deconstruct the bullshit of ID seem compelled to kill God while they're at it, and when they go there, they provoke a visceral response in their listeners making them equate evolution with atheism. This isn't going to win many converts here in the US, and it's flat out wrong to imply that the former requires the latter.

And it's also unnecessary when it's so easy to argue that there are piles and piles of evidence for evolution pitted against the word of a few hucksters and science burnouts on the side of Intelligent Design. It's hard to mess this one up if you just stick to the facts and stop letting the ID crowd drag the discussion over to religion, where they will win... every... single... time... They can't win the science - most of them don't understand it anyway - but they can unanimously pull on the heartstrings.

So why not try pushing these ID freaks off-balance, and let God take charge (if only temporarily) of all the dark corners of the unexplained? I mean it's not like anyone is going to be able to tell us what the universe was doing before the big bang, nor are they likely to come up with a good answer to any of the other really big questions like just how did we end up self-aware, and hey, if science figures it out someday, yay science. Meanwhile, ID takes a proud position with the flat-earthers and the stork theory of birth.

If I were to debate the ID crowd, the first thing I'd do is admit that I have absolutely zero evidence that there isn't some sort of creative force somewhere out there. I'd be silly to bring my personal beliefs into the discussion because they are just not relevant. And IMO it's not equivalent to saying there isn't any evidence against the existence of Santa Claus or The Easter Bunny because, bluntly, the universe itself is existence proof that *something* very mysterious happened and continues to this day. If you want to put God at square one, no problem with me. Embrace the mystery - it's more romantic that way anyway.

Besides the ridiculous pseudoscience of ID, what really irks me is the nature of the God behind it. If ID is how it all happened, do we really want to believe in this puny God that has to micromanage creation like a real-time strategy game lest it all derail and turn to sheol? Is God with a capital G little more than bill gates with a lower case g, doomed to spend eternity releasing service packs like the compound eye to correct the uncountably infinite number of bugs in His creation? What a poser. The way things are going, mankind ought to be overtaking this old fart with a beard in about a century or so. Or at least the Chinese and the Europeans will.

More seriously, if God is stuck tinkering with existence to this level of detail, what does that say about free will? I'm sorry your honor, but God needed to cleanse the city of unbelievers and he was too busy refining his most holy plague, HIV, to have time to do it himself, so he appeared to me as a talking beer can and my work began. I'll remember that the next time I get a traffic ticker.

Now wouldn't one (I know I would) prefer a god that hits the cosmic compile-link-execute button once, and just once, having gotten the gist of the design right on the first try, who can then let it all unfold like some 9-dimensional cosmic screensaver? Mankind today can genetically engineer custom organisms, and in a hundred or years, probably design them from scratch. Unless the Rapture is really, really near, the God of ID is about to get outsourced.