In a letter to his friend and confidant Asa Gray in 1860, Charles Darwin famously wrote:

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

The creature Darwin was referring to is a parasitic wasp that paralyzes its prey (a living caterpillar or other insect) and then lays its eggs inside their stilled bodies so hatching larvae will have fresh meat to feed on.

For Darwin, Nature’s rampant cruelty and blindness to suffering were strikes against the possibility of creation by a God of infinite love. And he was right in thinking so, says Robert Newman, an intelligent design proponent whose book, “What’s Darwin got to do with it?,” is promoted on the website of the Discovery Institute, the Christian think-tank that masterminds the ID movement.

Instead, Newman thinks there is another explanation: angels, specifically “bad angels,” aka demons.

In an article entitled “Rumors of Angels: Using ID to Detect Malevolent Spiritual Agents,” published on the website of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute and uncovered by Nick Matzke over at The Panda’s Thumb, Newman writes:

“Between the actions of an infinite, eternal, omniscient being and those of us lowly humans, could we find evidence for the actions of intermediate beings such as angels? The works of good angels might easily be mistaken for those of God, except that the quality might not be up to the divine standard. And design that appears to us to be malevolent might be the work of sinful beings above our level–bad angels, demons, or Satan.”

Of course, humans might be mistaken in considering Ichneumonidae to be malevolent, Newman writes, because “After all, many of the insects that are killed by the Ichneumonidae are pests to human farmers.”

Newman believes that if scientists weren’t so quick to dismiss the existence of angels, then they would have explanations for otherwise puzzling (at least from a biblical viewpoint) natural phenomena. In addition to explaining the behavior of parasitic wasp, bad angels might also be responsible for diseases such as AIDS and Ebola.

If scientists were to look closely, they might also find examples of the handiwork of “good angels.”

One such example, Newman says, is the famous panda’s thumb. In addition to their five fingers, pandas have an opposable “thumb” that they use to grasp and manipulate bamboo. But unlike the specialized thumbs of humans, a panda’s thumb is made by enlarging a few bones that form the wrist in other species and rerouting some muscles.

This, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, is not good design, but it would be expected of evolution by natural selection, a process that can’t create from scratch but that must work with the resources that are available.

But again, Newman has an alternative explanation. Assuming that the panda’s thumb is bad design (something that he isn’t fully convinced of), “may it not be the work of genetic manipulation by angels, who are constrained by history to work with what is available in the ancestral panda lineage, unlike an omniscient, omnipotent God making a new design from scratch?”

Newman’s article is worth a read if you’re curious to see how ID proponents twist facts to justify their erroneous conclusions. In the section about AIDS, for example, Newman gives a fairly accurate description of how the HIV virus infects its host cell (by converting its RNA to DNA and then inserting into the genome of its human host cell) and spreads and points out how AIDS has killed tens of millions of people, but his only link to angels (or demons in this case) is this line: “Fiendishly clever, don’t you think?” He then does a similar thing with Ebola.

The article would have made a good ID parody or April Fools joke, which is what I initially thought it was, except that Newman is serious.

The article is long (almost 5,000 words), but once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. It’s like watching a conman in action or reading the hallucinogenic ravings of a schizophrenic. You’re disgusted and repelled, but fascinated at the same time.