What to show someone who believes in “Intelligent” Design.

So, the redundancy of the appendix, the fact that men get swollen prostates in old age, the existence of bacteria, viruses (including the worst and deadly kinds), earthquakes, volcanoes and the biological pathology of cancer don’t persuade the “Intelligent” Design crowd that the world was not created by anyone who knew what the hell they were doing. And even less so by anyone with humankind’s best interest at heart. So what do you tell these people?

Well, there are two alternatives. One is that the person you’re dealing with, this ID-er, is interested in evidence but temporarily misguided – perhaps the unwitting dupe of creationist propaganda. For such a one there is hope since appeals to his intelligence are not altogether ruled out. People of religious faith, including ID, who are recalcitrant to such inconveniences as reality and fact, are, I fear, most likely to be stuck permanently in the no-hope zone. The following video is unlikely to move them. In either case, I challenge any “Intelligent” Design advocate to refute this:

The evidence presented above was published in Nature in 2004. The man speaking is Professor Kenneth Miller – a determined opponent of “Intelligent” Design idiocy and the author of the highly recommended book Finding Darwin’s God. The trial he was talking about was Kitzmiller vs The Dover Area School District (2005). The lecture in its entirety is available here.