Here's a post that I put up on that horrid Evangelical Outpost Blog

Here's an argument for you. If as these ID'ers claim, that the world that we live in is the product of some intelligent design, why does the design seem so unintelligent? I mean all around me I see children born with terrible deformities, natural disasters that kill scores, and the platapus. If I were to design the world that we lived in I would be sure to leave out all this sort of stuff. So does that mean I'm more intelligent than God? I think so. You all ought to read Bertrand Russell's "Why I'm not a Christian". He'll set you straight. Moreover, I just can't believe that this argument is still around. It's been blown out of the water a million different ways by a million different people a million different times. Sure,it's managed to take on a slightgly new form in that the new ID'ers throw in a lot of scientific jargon as window dressing. The goal of all this is to show how incredibly complex the natural world is, which presumably leads to the inference that there must be an intelligent designer because it's just to complicated to happen on it's own. For example, one of the claims that I've seen is the notion that the universe must be the prooduct of intelligent design because the chances of it forming in a manner sufficient to prevent it from collapsing back on itself are next to nothing. There are a couple of obvious problems with this. First,if the universe did collapse back onto itself, and return to nothing more than that little dot the preceeded the big bang, there's nothing to prevent it from having another go at it. So, if the chances are one-in-a-million, but it has a million chances, it doesn't look so improbable after all. Second, consider this: Right now I am looking at a pizza I ordered. The probability of this pizza being created just the way it was is next to nothing. It could have a different amount of cheese than it does (no matter how slight); the toppings, or just one, could be placed just a fraction of an inch from where they are now; it could have expanded in millions of unique ways; the bubbles that appear could be form in countless ways. Given all this, the chances that my pizza is exactly like it is, and not like any of the countless other ways it could be, are incredibly remote. But do when then want to say that God must be behind the creation of my pizza. Does God work at Pizza Hut? You all should just give up on trying to rationalize this silly little notion of yours. You are more than entitled to it (although Russell has some great points about what an immoral and evil belief system Christianity is). We all have rational beliefs. But when you try to rationalize them, you just come off, sad to say, as foolish.