The theory of Intelligent Design holds up for about eight seconds to the onslaught of common sense. The key is to find a small child who has not yet had the tendency to raise inconvenient religious questions beaten out of him yet.

When faced with the premise that life and the universe are so extremely complex that they must have been "made" by some intelligent designer, i.e. God,* the child will immediately pop up with "well, who made God then?"

The child sees immediately that something complex enough to have designed and built a universe could not, of course, have simply appeared by accident. Who made the Watchmaker? Most children will begin to wonder if God has a Supreme Being of his own, and so on to the Last Visible God. It is at this point that the child is seized, and sufficient theological verbal fog involving eternity and infinite existence is pumped into his head to smooth over all those uncomfortable wrinkles in his brain.

Even a mild knowledge of chemistry and physics shows that moving from chaos to order is not that difficult given enough external energy dumped in the front. As just one small example, it is almost impossible to prevent carbon, hydrogen and other atoms from forming relatively complex organic molecules with mathematically precise characteristics if you dump them together and give them a kick in the pants.

I have no problem with religions. Whatever one comes up with to try to shield themselves from the black infinity of the universe is no skin off my nose, and far be it from me to mess up someone else's head if he stays away from mine. I firmly believe that to wreck another person's faith, when that faith is harmless to others and minds its own business (an important caveat), is a rotten thing to do. Militant atheists piss me off even worse than evangelists.

*Damn few opponents of the Theory of Evolution in the schools will say it was aliens.