Some other curious implications of the idea of the Great Magician:
1. There is no logical explanation for limiting the Great Magician’s work to biology. Any Being that powerful could and would meddle in everything. If the Great Magician exists, its power and influence would spread out into geology, chemistry, physics, culture, politics, economics, science…
2. A Great Magician’s work is never done. Millions upon millions of new species over the ages to be created. Millions upon millions of old species to be killed off to get them out of the way.
3. The Great Magician is a trickster god. Making deliberate design look like evolutionary adaptations, such as fossilized bones and tracks, all those apparently related genomes, and all those apparently adaptive panda’s thumbs. This trickster god wants to make it really hard for us to believe in Him.
4. The Magic has apparently stopped fairly recently. No new miraculous creations have been noted in modern times. The Great Magician is on vacation.
5. The Problem of Evil rears its ugly head. All the things that go badly for organisms must be attributed to the shoddy workmanship or malevolent designs of the Great Magician.
More seriously, the core problem with ID is its insistence on belief in the absence of good evidence. This makes ID a religion, not a science.
We Humanists take our ability to perceive and understand reality as accurately as possible very seriously. We take the physical nature of reality very seriously. Matter and energy, cause and effect are to be respected, not derided. Biological evolution shows us how real biological systems work over a long period of time. It reveals our human origins and the history of what made us human. It shows us that we are responsible for what we do and what we become.
Intelligent Design misleads us. Evolution informs us, and perhaps even inspires us—to be who we are and to do what we can.
Selected works on both sides of the debate:
The Creationists:
Behe, Michael, “Darwin’s Black Box”
Dembski, William A., “Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology”
Johnson, Phillip E., “The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism”
The Evolutionists:
Dennett, Daniel E., “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”
Miller, Kenneth, “Finding Darwin’s God” [written by an evolutionary theist, but very well reasoned]
Pennock, Robert, “The Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism”
Ruse, Michael, “Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy.”
Citations:
(1) p. 132, Miller
(2) p. 272, Pennock
(3) p. 174 Miller
(4) p. 144 Miller
(5) p. 111 Miller