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Recognizing an Intelligent Designer rather than chaos does, though. No butterflies required, just admitting the obvious.

But what's obvious to one person is, um, not obvious to another. Having "watched" a teenager grow from an embryo, I'm impressed by what cells can produce when they "up and go at it." (The problem with your analogy is that watches aren't living things.) I didn't see any place a Designer intervened in that process, which seems every bit as complicated as evolving an eye.

The point is, though, that what seems obvious to you or me isn't a basis for science instruction either. After all, it seems pretty obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, doesn't it?

“After all, it seems pretty obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, doesn’t it? “

Yes, that’s how it appears. But as we pursue scientific discovery and build upon generations of the great insights of truly great minds, we can unfold some of the mysteries of the universe. I am all for it.

I don’t think that the sun going round the earth is a mere happenstance, though, which is where I guess you and I differ.

"Having "watched" a teenager grow from an embryo, I'm impressed by what cells can produce when they "up and go at it."

Me too. Rather than consider the entire teenager, let's consider just his eye.

The eye is a marvel of design; it is made of a number of parts -- an enclosed sphere; a field of light receptive cells; a transparent, focusing lens; an iris that adjusts the amount of light let in; a transparent cornea to protect the lens and iris; a system of muscles to move the eye in its socket; and a highly complicated section of the brain to process its signals -- that all work in harmony to allow us to see. And to top it all off, we have two of them! How did it evolve?

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." (The Origin of Species, Chapter Six: "Difficulties of the Theory", "Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication")