Goldfish Believe in Intelligent Design Too

I saw the cartoon years ago, and I think of it always when I read news accounts about the current creationist rave “Intelligent Design” (ID), the notion that “life on earth is too complex to be explained by random genetic mutation and therefore a guiding force must be involved” (link). Two goldfish are swimming in their bowl, and one goldfish says to the other, “There must be a God. After all, someone changes the water everyday.” The goldfish employ the same illogic as the IDiacs: when a phenomenon is presently unexplainable in evidentiary and technological terms, the God hypothesis wins by default. That’s sheer nonsense.

The IDiacs obsess on the notion of “random” mutation as the basis for their criticism of evolutionary theory. But the notion of randomness they employ is deceitful. As any mathematician knows, although the sequence of events resulting in the present order of the universe (including our genes) is infinitesimally small, the probability that the universe would assume some order is 1 (or certain). Once some first order of the universe occurs, all subsequent re-orderings of the universe preceding the present one become increasingly more probable.

Of course, the damning reason against treating ID as a viable scientific theory is that whereas the “gaps” in evolutionary theory are in principle potentially discoverable by scientific means, discovering the Intelligent Designer is not. Besides, do spiritual persons really want to suggest that their Intelligent Designer could be discovered slithering on a slide beneath a microscope?
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A good overview of ID can be found here.