Strawmen are easy, aren't they? Koukl is an old earth creationist, and nowhere suggested that God recently created the earth, complete with predefined fossil arrangements, with the intent to fool some into thinking that complex and less-complex organisms must share a common ancestry.
That, of course, explains nothing.
Indeed. How can a non-existant concept explain anything?
But Koukl then claims he has independent evidence that there really is such a magical God-person out there. Unfortunately he forgot to actually tell us what that evidence was. Must've been an oversight.
The piece, like many of his short commentaries, was obviously intended to discuss a philosophical point, not lay out a treatise on the evidence for a designer... a topic he's addressed at other times.
No, it's just a simple case of Occam's Razor, as steve-b pointed out in a different sub-thread here. The evidence points to evolution, but it's equally compatible with an infinitely devious trickster god, or a very devious & skilled group of cobbler's elves.Wellllll... A sufficiently powerful & intelligent being could indeed magically create all the fossils in the world and place them in such a way as to make things look like it had all evolved. He could also have created the whole universe Last Thursday, complete with our false memories of time before that, etc. etc. ad absurdum. The Invisible Diabolically Subtle Trickster hypothesis is always an option, in any scientific question.
Strawmen are easy, aren't they? Koukl is an old earth creationist, and nowhere suggested that God recently created the earth, complete with predefined fossil arrangements, with the intent to fool some into thinking that complex and less-complex organisms must share a common ancestry.
Your task is to come up with positive evidence for these elves/tricksters. There is not an epistemological equivalency here!