Your vote pattern is an excellent example of how divisive religious themes can be, especially after my semantic battles this week. So I'm weighing in with 555s on your side, regardless of artistic quality, which is up to your usual standards anyway..

Al - Many of our American Founding Fathers, exemplars of the Age of Enlightenment, solved the paradox by becoming Deists. This was expressed by Paley's famous quote about finding a watch on a deserted beach and therefore assuming that a watchmaker must have existed somewhere at some time.

Well put :-) I have frequently asked in discussions about these sorts of things why somebody might think their god decided to put all those geological strata with obviously evolving fossils (well, fossils from obviously evolving species.. fossils themselves don't do much evolving and wouldn't be much use if they did) so that anybody who looked at them with an open mind would come to the conclusion that life had evolved over many millennia.. why would a god create a world like that?

One day, a few decades after you academic fools lose all funding for your quackery due to the economic implosion your mathematical illiteracy caused, everyone will be laughing at you for being such boneheads that you could believe in this pseudo-scientific "evolution" and all the idiocy its charlatan high priests used to push in the brainwashing centers known as public schools. Ironically, you "evolutionists" of all stripes will also receive the ultimate Darwin Award (though it really ought to be called the Malthus Award) for having developed absolutely no useful skills for survival whatsoever and thus having starved to death and/or been exterminated for being "unfit" useless eaters and parasites in the wake of civilization's collapse.

@ SHTF When my younger daughter was five, she said: 'Santa doesn't leave those presents on Xmas Day. It's really you, isn't it?' I said 'Well done, Georgia. You're quite right. It's just a little game we all play.' It was then I knew she was gonna be OK, immune from the far-fetched creation myths of primitive bronze-age goatherders and relying on her own observations and common sense. She now teaches basic science to elementary schoolkids. How glad I am it's her and not the likes of you.

Geez, how many fake SNs and sock-puppets are there on this site???

Forget where you came from, focus on where you're going and where you wanna end up..

For many years Intelligent Design has been using the human eye as an example as to why there must be a Designer responsible for all life. This has now been dropped after Michael Beye, author of numerous ID books and articles, discovered he needed glasses.

"The eye is a pretty shoddy design," said Beye, in a press conference. "Not only does it get deformed too easily, allowing short-sightedness and long-sightedness to develop, but the lens can get cataracts, pressure can build up to cause glaucoma and the retina is behind the nerves that send the signals of what light hits the retina to the brain, giving people a blind spot."

None of these flaws would be built into a designed eye, as evidenced by the eyes designed for robots.

The hunt is now on for a new model to hold up as evidence for an Intelligent Designer.

"We thought about teeth, in all of their perfectly designed glory," said Beye. "But then we realized that enamel is rubbish. Who'd design a material that can be worn away by that which it's meant to chew? Or provide too many teeth to fit into the jaw? If you were going to design teeth, you'd coat them in something harder, and they'd grow back as and when they were needed."

Body part by body part, the Intelligent Design movement has been through the human body. Not even the brain, the most powerful computer known to man, but with its hundreds of flaws, is suitable.

"We've come to the conclusion," said Beye, "that if the human body is a product of a designer, it must have been an apprentice doing his first solo job. There are too many problems with it. Even toe-nails are rubbish. Why do we even have them? And what are male nipples for? Good grief!"

Instead, the Intelligent Design community has focused on the butterfly, and hope that they can use this as a revised proof of an intelligent designer.

"Butterflies are perfectly adapted," said Beye. "I mean designed. They are our new figurehead!"

I am indebted to IainB for this analysis.

Nice, BB, but I am a Pastafarian, a firm (but not al dente) believer that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, I and millions of my fellow Faithful demand that public schools teach this theory as an alternative to evolution AND intelligent design. I urge you all to access the dialectic of Pastafarianism on the Internet.

We true believers have our own divine revelations: It all began when an intelligent God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, revealed himself to Bobby Henderson in a dream. Later, a woman "conceived the spirit of our Divine Lord," the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while eating alone at the Olive Garden.

"I heard singing, and tomato sauce rained from the sky, and I saw angel hair pasta flying about with little farfalle wings and playing harps," she recalled. "It was beautiful." The Flying Spaghetti Monster, she went on, impregnated her and told her, "You shall name Him ... Prego ... and He shall bring in a new era of love."

You can look it up.

Old Man Ribber: Two hundred years ago, Paley's teleological argument was that the watchmaker is God, the Intelligent Designer. But I and all evolutionists reject the scenario featuring a forever-deserted beach upon which lies a complex mechanism. A human watchmaker was there, and left his work behind!
Intelligent Design theories go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Various school boards, notably the one in Kansas, have attempted to dress up this view as science in order to counter the fact of evolution as presented in text books.
If Paley were alive today and saw the carved faces on Mt. Rushmore, which he undoubtedly would think was inaccessible, he would claim that it was the work of God the Sculptor.

I had missed this gem that you posted a month before I got into this web-site and this avocation. Truly clever!! and a bonus for the gumption to use "data" as a plural. To continue the discussion started over "Baby James Suite"....Your humor lies primarily and marvellously in the unintended use of the OS, with lyrics that we all know, to precisely give a message (not to discount your brilliant wordplay). Your work represents a more pointed debunking of Garland's child-like paradise compared to my send-up of JT's faux-cowboy vision; my signature seems to be the inclusion of reference to the origin and effect of the OS (as in "Canadian Reunion", "Anacroni, Anacrona"). Why does one style qualify as parody, and the other maybe not? GioLio