Forget the fact that "intelligent design" (creationism masquerading in a lab coat) is laughed out of every peer-reviewed scientific publication, thereby resorting to spreading its message directly to the uneducated masses through shitty DVDs starring the Clear Eyes guy. At the end of the day, intelligent design relies not on any evidence, but a single infantile assertion made by simplistic minds:
"Life and all its diversity here on Earth is too complex to have originated and blossomed without a master plan and a guiding vision."
This is the brick wall you reach with a creationist whenever you start to whittle away his grossly misunderstood scientific facts that he thinks support the God-did-it supposition. "Life is just too complex, man! Some conscious force HAD to have made it happen. There's just no other explanation for something that complex!"
Really now? Is this an actual brick wall or is there more to this path? I say that like so many things with believers, the wall only exists because they think and act like it does. So fuck that, let's keep going! And it is when you continue to ride the train of logic towards its ultimate destination that you quickly begin to understand how hopelessly wrong the foundational viewpoint behind intelligent design is.
Alright, so let's say the creationists are right and life really IS so complex that the only explanation must be a conscious force. To so masterfully craft this complexity, this force would have to understand every working part of his creation: every single one of the estimated 100 million species on Earth, every little kicking bag of chemicals, every atom of every DNA strand that ever existed over the course of 1.5 billion years.
So this creator sounds like a pretty smart sonofabitch, doesn't he? He must have an extraordinarily powerful intellect. In fact, his mind sounds incredibly... complex.
The creationist folks love to whip out the "common sense" watchmaker analogy and ask "Have you ever seen anything with, say, the intricacy of a watch assemble itself on its own? Something that complex must've had an intelligent master designer!" Alrighty, so then let's pose another common sense question: "Have you ever known any intelligent designer (man or otherwise) purposefully design something more complex than himself?"
It doesn't happen. No intelligently designed creation has ever been made that surpasses the complexity of said creator. No watch, no computer, no space station even approaches the complexity of its designer.
So if God the Creator designed life, he himself is surely more complex than his creation. But then that means this Creator's more complex mind must have ALSO had a creator! Think about it... if the creationists are right and there's no other explanation for something as huge as life, then there is sure as hell no other explanation for something even grander, right? So then it means that a 2nd-tier deity (we'll call him SuperGod) devised and created the ultra-complex wonder that is God's mind which in turn created life on Earth.
But then... this 2nd-tier SuperGod must have had an EVEN MORE COMPLEX mind to have come up with all that shit!! And since both life and God's mind can ONLY be explained by a master creator, then surely the even-more complex SuperGod's mind can only be explained with a creator! So we have a 3rd-tier god -- MegaGod.
And then of course a 4th-tier one. UltraGod?
And a 5th.
And a 20th.
And so on and so on to infinity.
This train of logic runs forever with no ultimate destination. Just one Chinese box nested in another one over and over. Ironically, creationists will be the first to tell you that there is actually nothing more complex than that first creator (God forbid their imaginary friend ISN'T the greatest thing in the universe!)... and yet the logic of their primitive assertion regarding the purposeful design of complex systems clearly neccessitates this endless Matryoshka scenario of UltraGods and SuperGods.
Therefore...
"Intelligent design" is not an answer to anything. It is a self-neutralizing supposition too simple & stupid to realize its own simplistic stupidity.
Which can, through no great stretch, be said about God in general.
Religious folks and those who see the value of religion in general like to point out that we're all just looking for answers to life's great mysteries. The problem is that "God" is ultimately not any real answer to any question. "God" is simply the point at which an intellectually sluggish theist decided to stop asking further questions. God is the stop at which the believer got tired of riding the logic train and hopped off, convincing himself that there's nothing more to see beyond. He then builds a brick wall right there on the tracks and happily leans on it, confident that he's found the place at which the path ends.
And it is no coincidence that a lazy, simplistic solution in narrative storytelling is called "deus ex machina". The notion of God is the granddaddy of all deus ex machinas: a lazy solution to the narrative of life's story.
