It’s the 20-year anniversary of Darwin on Trial, the book that started the Intelligent Design movement, and here, via PZ Myers, is a link to Jason Rosenhouse’s blog post, “ID is Dead.” It’s a good review of what ID has failed to accomplish in the past 20 years, but at first I thought, “Gosh, I hope he’s wrong. It would really be terrible if ID were dead.” Then I remembered: Hey, these are fundamentalist Christians we’re talking about. Keeping dead things alive in their hearts and dreams is like second nature to them. And sure enough, here’s a post by David Klinghoffer doing what ID’ers do best: pouting, patronizing, and bragging about what might be called peer-reviewed ID papers if you aren’t too picky about details. I’m confidently optimistic that the ID zombie is alive-ish and shambling, and we’ll continue to see him lurching about for many years to come.

Why is that a good thing? Because Intelligent Design—or perhaps we should call it Not Intelligent Enough Design—is a great way to show that Yahweh is a man-made God.

When you look at the main message of ID/NIED, it’s easy to see that the main focus of the movement is hostility towards evolution. Oh, sure, it’s full of appeals to superstitious animism, and some of its major arguments (e.g. the Fine Tuning argument) boil down to giving magical entities credit for poorly-understood phenomena, which is practically the definition of superstition. When they try to come up with scientific, non-superstitious arguments for God, though, they all come back to the same theme: that evolution can’t be true, and by the way Darwin was the bastard child of Satan.

That’s great, because that’s the kind of “knowledge” that comes directly from the Christian worldview. Evolution is a process of enormous elegance and subtlety, and even our most brilliant minds have to work hard to understand even a part of it all. There’s just no way that a mythical deity, invented by primitive and superstitious tribesmen, could have had the ability to come up with anything remotely as sophisticated as that. Whether you’re a skeptic or a devout believer, one thing we can all agree on is that there’s no way a man-made God, invented during the Bronze Age, would be capable of designing and implementing the kind of powerful, flexible, innovative and awesome system that makes evolution possible.

Of course, if there were a real God, a God not invented by men, a God whose ability to create was not restricted to what some Bronze Age shaman was capable of imagining, then ID supporters would have no way to be sure that evolution might not be one of those “mysterious ways” that God is always described as having. They could not know as unshakably as they do that God never successfully implemented a true evolutionary system. They’d have to temper their investigation with the caution that perhaps God might have done greater deeds than what ancient generations of men imagined.

But they don’t. Look at Michael Behe, on the witness stand, as the opposing counsel piles up volume after volume of research into the evolutionary antecedents of the modern immune system. It’s a mountain of evidence disproving his contention that the immune system is irreducibly complex, but he is smiling and unphased. He knows that such a powerful natural system, capable of evolving the modern immune response, is light-years beyond anything his man-made deity could possibly have come up with on His own. The evidence is irrelevant. His faith is founded on what men were saying thousands of years ago, and since they could not imagine a God capable of building a working evolutionary system, Behe knows Yahweh could not possibly have designed one and gotten it working.

And that’s what’s so awesome about ID/NIED. The only way you can be absolutely sure that God could not and would not create a full-blown evolutionary system is if He were the product of your own imagination, putting you in complete control of the abilities you imagine Him to have. The ID/NIED movement would not be a viable alternative if God were real, because His thoughts might be above your thoughts, and you wouldn’t know whether Darwin was right or not until you actually looked at the evidence. And even then, if you found evidence against evolution, you’d only be documenting the fact that your God was Not Intelligent Enough to Design a system as brilliant and as advantageous as Darwin’s—not exactly what you’d call giving God the glory.

So hat’s off to Phillip Johnson, the non-scientist who tried to overturn science and ended up overthrowing God instead. You’ve given us one more piece of evidence against your own Gospel, and it’s evidence you didn’t need to give. Very generous of you. Thanks.