Intelligent Design Creationism, the Disco Institute's underdeveloped brainchild, has been parodied by The Onion today, although you might not realize it at first.
One of creationists' favorite claims involves the "Cambrian Explosion" -- simply replace "Triassic Period" in this article with "Cambrian Explosion" and you'll get the humor.
The basic question applies as much to the Cambrian as to "irreducible complexity" -- how does one recognize supernatural intervention? What's humorous is that when examples like the flagellum are pointed out, one must ask, "So God 'poofed' the flagellum into being, but everything else in the organism evolved?" The point is, just like with the Cambrian, if there is some issue of complexity, or if some facet of knowledge has not yet been thoroughly explained by science, this is a "gap" for a god to fit in. But all around this "gap" are perfectly reasonable explanations for everything else.
Since gods like these get squeezed out of all the other gaps, these gaps become very, very rare. And so one is left with a ridiculous belief system, like that parodied in the article, where you accept 99.9% of the world as naturally-explained, but fill 0.01% of our ignorance with your god.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism
