I see arguments by intelligent design folks on Quora all the time. The arguments aren't even arguments. They're just hole-poking attempts. Like: "We know a designer must be involved, because many parts the human body are irreducibly complex, such as the eyeball. Since evolution clearly could not have produced the human eye, we know God did it."

There's so much wrong with that.

First of all, evolutionary biologists don't have to know how every tiny bit of evolution worked in every instance to be able to observe that it happened. Science is an organized, refereed, self-correcting process of expanding human knowledge. Unlike religion, science doesn't claim to know everything. Science claims to be gathering knowledge and seeking to understand how things work.

Second, these so-called intelligent design proponents are just wrong about biological phenomena being irreducibly complex. They argue strenuously, for example, that the human eye couldn't have evolved, because no intermediate stages would have been useful to an organism. But that's ridiculous. We can look at organisms today that have no more than simple light-sensing cells that provide them a survival advantage, and that have thus conserved.

We can see organisms where those light-sensing cells are more organized and provide even more advantage, while not yet providing what wethink of as sight.

Nobody except intelligent-design proponents thinks eyeballs are irreducibly complex. But they often put out pretty slick propaganda it makes it look like their arguments are convincing. But they don't provide any context or information to the contrary, like what happens automatically in the self-correcting process of science.

But it's enough to convince religious fanatics, who are already invested in believing that science usually produces false results.

These are the same people who deny human-caused climate change, claim that vaccines hurt people, etc.

Part of an epidemic of willful ignorance.