Perspectives on the Cambrian Explosion

I must have been listening to too much pro-ID propaganda!  (I have!)  The proponents of Intelligent Design put up a superb, almost-convincing, smoke-screen and one of their favourite topics is 'The Cambrian Explosion' and that Darwin himself had recognised this as a problem.  They claim that the increased rate of evolution in that period of a few tens of millions of years, about half a billion years ago, shows evidence of the presence of an intelligent designer.  This seems to be based on a claim that information cannot be created except by intelligence.  More on that topic soon! 

Of course sometimes they take that trouble to pretend that this is not a religious claim!  Honestly it isn't.  You can believe everything they say, including this claim.

Reading the Wikipdia article about The Cambrian Explosion this evening, I was reminded that conventional science is by no means short of ways to explain the phenomenon, including:

• 'Large' animals of diverse types did exist before, and the evidence for them is growing steadily (in spite of the claims of ID's proponents)
• There are some special layers called lagerstätten, which preserved soft body parts unusually well, and several of these were in the Cambrian period
• Evolution was faster than 'normal' but not by more than a factor of ten or so, and there were other periods when 'explosions' happened, including the Devonian and Cretaceous
• A sudden increase in the amount of calcium in the oceans might have been significant for the innovative production of bony body parts
• The end of a previous ice age might also have mattered a lot.

All in all, the presence of an intelligent designer is not the only plausible explanation, and not even the most probable, for various reasons:

• How long did this particular intelligent designer live, as the Cambrian explosion lasted for tens of millions of years? 
• If it lived for that long, does that imply that it was God after all, or was it a family of shorter lived designers?
• If it was God, why was he so busy for that short period before leaving things to themselves for 500 million years?  Only after that time did he complete his perfect world, where he created original sin and all the other bad things.
• If it was God, how did he evolve anyway?  If you can't explain this then the problem has only been deferred, not solved.

Case for God not proven! I also note that I and D are the first two letters of an uncomplimentary five letter word.

Small note:  Obviously when Meyer's new book 'Darwin's Doubt' is released (at an exorbitant price from here, but only delivered within USA) we will learn the answers to all our doubts.  In the meantime we still have the opportunity to listen to the whining voice of Casey Luskin on the Discovery Institute's podcast ID The Future telling us that he has read it and that it explains everything beautifully.