When you really analyze them, most of the strongest arguments against ID as an explanation for the development of life are of the form: “this just doesn’t look like the way God would have created things.” Perhaps not, but we are finding more and more that it does look very much like the way “we” design things. As far back as 1985, in my first book about PDE2D here and more recently in a Mathematical Intelligencer article here , I pointed out that life developed much the way software “develops”: minor improvements are made in small increments, but major improvements always involve one or more large irreducibly complex steps, and appear suddenly (in the fossil record, or in software releases).
This similarity is impressed upon me everytime I make a major improvement to my PDE-solver, PDE2D , which I have been working on for over 30 years now. I recently decided to make another major improvement (a GUI), and I alway dread making the big changes, because they involve adding hundreds of lines of code, which cannot even be tested until well advanced, because the individual lines make no sense independently of each other. I have to sit down in front of my computer for days before I can even run the first meaningful tests. I compared these major changes to new orders, classes and phyla in my articles, which always appear suddenly in the fossil record, and for good reason, if you think about the changes involved.
Now, of course if you carefully analyze the changes made during one of these periods you may find that the whole thing wasn’t really one big irreducibly complex step; that if I were more clever I could have done it in somewhat smaller useful (and thus testable) intermediate steps. But the idea that one could make major improvements to software–or to living things–through very tiny minor improvements is something only an evolutionary biologist could imagine.