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!
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.
Occam's Razor is misapplied here.
Occam's Razor presupposes an unnecessary plurality: if the simplest (in this case, naturalistic) explanation is sufficient, why inject God (metaphysics) into the equation as an alternative explanation?
Wielding Occam's Razor in this case only works, of course, if the naturalistic explanation IS sufficient - if the evidence for that explanation is found wanting, then waving the Razor amounts to little more than premature waving of the victory flag.
Considering that those having concerns about the various flavors of evolutionary theory are not limited to only what you likely perceive as Bible-thumping fundies, I'd suggest that the "simplest" explanation may not be as ... fundamental... as you'd like. Particularly once one gets past the fossil record (where it's easy to picture one life form just sort of slowly changing over time into something else) and delves deeper into the more complex biochemical interactions that don't appear to lend themselves to Darwinistic mechanisms.
Occam's Razor also presupposes little or no evidence for the more "complex" explanation. Looking outside of the confines of an evolutionary debate could provide evidence supporting a metaphysical alternative to Darwinism (e.g.; the odds against there being any life-supporting body in the universe , who was Christ, what is the evidence for a resurrection, what are the evidences/philosophical arguments for dualism, the continued failure to satisfactorily explain abiogenesis, etc.)
Your task is to come up with positive evidence for these elves/tricksters.
Not today, thanks!