Over at The Stream, our friends Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt kindly gave me the opportunity to write about the new documentary brief, The Information Enigma, which summarizes the “information argument” for ID. See “Intelligent Design Without Tears: A New Video Makes the Controversial Theory More Accessible than Ever.”

Acknowledging that the technical details behind the case for ID can be intimidating for the uninitiated — which is why we made the video! — I begin:

Intelligent design, habitually demonized in the media as “science denial” or “creationism,” may be the most misunderstood scientific idea ever. The phrase itself is certainly well known. Stephen King, ultra-bestselling novelist, has spoken out to endorse intelligent design (or ID) by name (see here and here). Another mega-popular writer, Dean Koontz, wrote a recent novel with ID as a theme.

Still another fantastically popular author, Tom Wolfe, told the The New Yorker that persecution of ID scientists is comparable to the Spanish Inquisition.

Yet Darwinists have done such an energetic job of confusing the public that the scientific alternative to orthodox evolutionary theory remains foggy at best even for many thoughtful people, including some who are instinctively sympathetic to it.

As if to confirm the point, a friend this morning sends along a response. He recently got excited by the ID argument and has been forwarding the link to The Information Engima to his own circle of friends and relatives, including “scientist atheist” types. One wrote back without an argument but simply copying and pasting the URL for a post by geologist Donald Prothero railing against Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt. (Dr. Meyer, with molecular biologist Douglas Axe, is the star of The Information Enigma, whose script I drafted.)

What does Prothero’s review have to say about anything to do with our video? Nothing. It’s the one where Dr. Prothero, amid a lot of name-calling, emphasizes his contention that Meyer misleadingly minimized the duration of the Cambrian explosion. But it’s all a matter of semantics and, in any event, Meyer is in line with mainstream paleontology opinion that the Cambrian event is real, lasted some 10 million years, and that it demands an explanation.

The problem is that evolutionists can’t agree among themselves how to explain that sudden infusion of biological information in the seas of the early Earth. That is why they offer a new theory on the subject at a rate of what seems like every month or so. See our post of last week, “Latest Cambrian Explosion ‘Explanation’ Qualifies as Propaganda.”

On the substance of what Prothero does write, Meyer has already dispatched him, including in two genial video interviews we published here at Evolution News. I recommended them to my correspondent and his correspondent — they make for enjoyable watching.

Will this help? Perhaps. I think the way someone like my friend’s friend came across the Prothero review is likely with a hurried Google search. Did the third party then actually read the review all the way through or just the introductory fulminations? If past experience is a guide, then probably the latter. I would guess that something like their exchange is repeated often among interlocutors in the evolution debate.