Rebuttal to Sally Jenkins Article "Just Check the Id"

On August 29, 2005 the newspaper The Washington Post published an article by Sally Jerkins titled “Just Check The ID.” The article poses the question if modern athletes are the creation of intelligent design, and attempts to provide evidence from various sources that leads to this theory. According to "Intelligent Design" (2012), “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”[1]

From the beginning of the article, there are statements that lack the support to be considered valid arguments. On the second paragraph, the author writes “what's so intelligently designed about ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a homerun.”[2] The premise is: Jose Canseco did a very unusual homerun. The conclusion: Intelligent design produced the result. However, there is no proof given that intelligent design is the reason for that accomplishment.

The third paragraph presents interesting logical fallacies. The author writes "The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world." The author does not mention who are the sources of these claims, she uses proof surrogate. Furthermore, complexity theorists attempt to explain how order results from disorder[3] instead of asserting that random mutation is not sufficient to explain the complex order in the natural world.

Past half the article, there is another questionable statement: “..try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would...