a theory's fatal flaw

Intelligent Design is attacking a convenient strawman, not the theory of evolution.

Over the last ten years just about every science journal and qualified academic levied weighty charges against creationism and its recent incarnation, Intelligent Design. ID is not the same thing as creationism, its not religious, its supporters say indignantly. The fact that there's only one Designer whose origins are not named or investigated, that it requires no experiments or adherence to the scientific method and posits that all life on Earth is so complex that it needs a nigh omnipotent being to bring it into existence by forces best left unquestioned, are just random coincidence.

But out of all the criticism the ID received, one has been oddly absent as many debaters started getting bogged down in the minutia of what bacteria evolved what cilia and why. The real flaw of ID is in its very origins. It aims to disprove evolution by tying it with something it never tries to explain. Evolution deals with living things changing over many eons. It has nothing to do with creation. It assumes the moment of creation already happened. Creationism and ID are trying to explain away evolution in the same way one would try to disprove the existence of airplanes by disputing how the Earths atmosphere formed to allow for flight.

In the words of a wise man: "swing and a miss."