I occasionally hang out on a blog called Stone the Preacher (it's run out of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, CA); I ended up there rebutting one of the standard canards of the fundamentalists (I think it was "atheists have no morals," but at this late date, I'm really not sure), and I kept going back, probably because I thrive on conflict. And run-on sentences. And recently, Pastor Steve, a young-earth creationist, made the mistake of mentioning "intelligent design."
I've always loved that phrase because of its inherent idiocy. "Intelligent design" is creationism wearing glasses and a clown nose, and the adjective is so clearly in conflict with the noun that people should be unable to avoid stuttering when they say it. Every attempt to sneak it into schools gets thoroughly destroyed in the courts, but that doesn't stop them from trying over and over again (for example, in Missouri and Indiana - and probably in some other state any day now).
Let's be honest: evolution explains why some of the ridiculous design flaws exist in the world. There is no "intelligence" in the "design" of the world, and examples are everywhere. Comedians have been pointing them out for years.
"God is a mechanical engineer! Look at this marvelous collection of joints and levers!"But fundies, being fundies, keep soldiering on, like particularly pious zombies on a quest for children's brains.
"No, God is an electrical engineer! Look at the intricacy of these neurons and synapses!"
"No," said the city planner, "God is obviously a civil engineer. Sometimes, when nobody's looking, it's just easier to run a sewer pipe through a recreational area."
Let's consider the evidence. And remember, the people who believe this silliness also believe that God doesn't make mistakes.
1. As we develop in the womb, we form three sets of kidneys. The pronephroi ("forekidneys") appear in the fourth week; they degenerate pretty quickly, but the ducts are recycled to build the mesonephroi ("midkidneys"). And then those degenerate and the tubules are recycled in the metanephroi ("hindkidneys"), which are our permanent kidneys.
This almost seems like an elegant bit of engineering, but really, it's more like building an Eiffel Tower as scaffolding for another Eiffel Tower, which is used as scaffolding for a final, bigger Eiffel Tower, and you rip down each one as you go (I don't remember where I saw that metaphor, but it's perfect). It's an unnecessarily complex process, and it's just evidence that evolution had a number of false starts along the way, and had to go back and refigure what it was building.
(On the subject of kidneys, why is the gene for polycystic kidney disease dominant? Why make it 50% likely that you'll inherit a painful, life-threatening condition?)
2. The female quoll (an Australian marsupial) has only six teats, but gives birth to a litter of 18, meaning that the 12 slowest or weakest die of starvation. A 66% death rate makes sense to you? Was God weeding out the weak ones? Why didn't He just build them right to begin with?
3. While you’re in Australia, look up the mystery of a kangaroo’s teeth, for that matter. The grasses they eat are tough, and wear down the front teeth of the 'roo. So, to make up for this, they Which sounds great, except that they don't have the ability to grow new teeth. So by the time they're 15 or 20, they run out, and starve to death. Apparently, God hates kangaroos, and wants to see them suffer.
4. Birds of the family Sulidae (boobies and gannets)...
...heh, heh... I said "boobies"...
4. Birds of the family Sulidae are diving birds, plunging into the water from the sky. One of their adaptations to this is that they don’t have external nostrils – the water would get shoved up their noses on impact. But even without external nostrils, they have everything else that makes up a nasal airway inside their beaks. It’s just that the nostrils are sealed off at the outside. Having nasal airways that can’t work is pretty pointless design. Although evolution tells us why they’re there, it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak. Did He build it from spare parts from another bird? If these things, and so many others, are designed, that’s some pretty shoddy craftsmanship.
Maybe God occasionally gets drunk on sacramental wine while He's working?
Fundies like Christine O'Donnell are always asking why we aren't seeing evolution occur today, yet it's all around us. Not just in things like bacteria become resistant to medicine or pests and weeds becoming resistant to pesticides and herbicides, But in humans, too. Some columnist once wondered why people found it so easy to accept spider webs as an evolutionary advance for spiders, but they couldn't accept the World Wide Web as an evolutionary advance for humans.
ReplyDeleteOur's is not to question why, our's is just to ....well, you know the rest.
ReplyDeleteDamn I feel so inferior. I mean really, is it a situation that God in his design made mistakes and had to redesign a better mousetrap? Or is it that God simply allowed his creation (as in the original one) to morph into a better advanced state. Or is it that maybe God had a assistant (like maybe a Mrs. God) who tinkered with his original creation and made it better. Or could it be that perhaps nature was guided by God to produce a better species (evolution) with each experiment. Or maybe it is just all a big continuous evolving process in which living organism adapts to it's changing environment and those who don't simply become extinct.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe as Jerry said we ain't supposed to question the divine guidance of a unsealable and unknowable Entity that somebody 6,000 years ago decided to call God.
For myself have better things to occupy my brain with.
Even when ideas are disproved beyond all redemption, they can hang around for centuries exhausting their potential in every area of life. That seems to be the case with biblical literalism. Such ideas even seem to undergo an ebb and flow in their acceptance – I'll venture a guess that a smaller percentage of Americans today believe in evolutionary process than in several previous decades of the last century.
ReplyDeleteI'm just surprised that the flat-earth theory isn't more popular. If you can believe the earth is six thousand years old, why stop at that idea? Why not go for broke? We know the Dr. Johnson quip, right? "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation…."
Finally, in keeping with Nameless' main point, this ignorant lizard has heard it summarized as follows: design implies simplicity to the extent the thing will bear. Extreme complexity would not, then, be an argument for "intelligent design" -- quite the reverse.
Well, RatNat, that's the thing. Back when I was inclined in that direction, I could handle the idea of evolution as God's tool. But not everybody can.
ReplyDeleteParticularly young earth Creationists, who can't reconcile a "loving God" with the process of evolution (especially the existence of death and suffering before the Fall of Man). They think it undermines the Bible by making the creation account a myth or parable, instead of a historical fact.
(Btw, "Mrs God"? Treading pretty close to blasphemy there, champ. That would just make Mary into his "girl on the side," wouldn't it? The Holy Whore?)
Nameless,
ReplyDeleteIn your exchanges with these people, have you encountered any discussions on the subject of irrational numbers? From what I understand, these folks dismiss all such concepts for this reason: Since G-D is intelligent, She cannot be irrational; hence irrational numbers cannot exist - which throws pi out the window leading to some very odd circles. It also means the square root of two is a non-starter, and calculating the mass of a proton is way too Wotan.
Years ago, there was an entry in the Conservapedia called "Tree Octopus," which was promptly removed when the Conserva-Dopes realized they had been duped. If all scientific knowledge dissipates in the coming Rapture, does this mean Intelligent Design is akin to Entropy?
Octo,
ReplyDeletePi is great -- I especially like rhubarb pi and lemon meringue, though the occasional peach cobbler is excellent, too. I'll have 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884... slices to go, please.
A simple-predatory-lizard thought. I think the contention of perspectives between religion and science is insoluble. If one tries to insist (as S.J. Gould did) that the two realms are non-overlapping magisteria, still no solution comes of it. Tennyson put the problem well in his In Memoriam A.H.H. lyrics – "Are God and Nature then at strife, / That nature lends such evil dreams? / So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life …." Making a deity the overlord of natural process either reduces that deity to the laws of natural process – evolutionary biology, physics, the whole nine yards – or sends a shudder down human spines (not mine, of course) to contemplate that "he who made the lamb" made the lion or the wolf that eats the lamb. Would a benevolent deity create such a universe, one in which pleasure and contentment are the brief respite from the inevitable ripping of flesh by monstrous teeth? Where every organism ends up table scraps so that others might live? Scarcity, necessity, and death appear to reign supreme. None of that sounds very warm and fuzzy, or particularly benevolent, and fables about how Adam and Eve ruined an originally benevolent creation when they bit into a wisdom-giving apple don't make the difficulty go away. I revere John Milton as a poet, but it's a bit much to ask even this simple dinosaur to believe that once upon a time the tiger's tooth was just for show, and "not nocent" yet. I don't suppose there was ever any period of "Love in the Time before the Apple-Chomp."
The only thing (aside from the Dinosaur Gods and the Greek Gods) that makes sense to me is something like an Epicurean angle, wherein the gods exist but don't make much never-mind about what goes on in the cosmos since they didn't create the world anyway. I also like the notion that we're just little bits of animated stardust, part of a system much greater than anything we can imagine – in some way that scarcely satisfies those who want eternal life as "who they now are" (permanent self consciousness-to-self) perhaps the stuff we're made of is always a participant in the comings and goings, the beginnings and endings, of life in the universe. Superior intelligences there may be, but I'll never be one to ratify anything like Panglossian optimism. As always, Shakespeare said it best: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."
Dino,
ReplyDeleteOh piffle, I have it on good authority that the answer to all of God's mysteries is hidden in pi somewhere after the ten to the 666th decimal but scientists are conspiring to keep that fact hidden. Maybe that's why you truncated after 36 or so? I smell heresy.
Octo,
I agree with Pythagoras that God abhors irrational numbers since that calls its existence into question. (sorry, Cthulhu is an it)
Same goes for Vacuums too since if ex nihilo, nehil fit is true, which being Latin, we must assume to be the case, there must have been air before there was God and unless air created itself. . . well that's one of those mysteries that confirm God and make Atheists squirm.
What baffles me about this intelligent design stuff is that the fundies demand we take the Bible literally. I read The Bible. I don;t remember the words "intelligent design" anywhere in it. It would be fun to argue with one of these idiots if Jesus rode a stegosaurus or triceratops though.
ReplyDeleteI'm content to admit there are some things God hasn't explained. Evolution is indeed as true as climate change. And people are capable of great good and great evil without God's or the devil's help.
Nameless,
ReplyDelete"it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak."
Why just to fool us and thereby test our faith. Same reason he designed the young earth to look old and put vestigial pelvis bones into whales and snakes and buried sea shells on top of Everest.
Same reason Satan put Newt into human form ( well, sort of) to fool us.
You just can't believe evidence of any kind I guess, and that why "a belief a day keeps the stress away." © (that's from Proverbs or someplace like that -- it must be in the Bible somewhere or maybe the Popol Vuh, or Bardo Thodol, or the Zend Avesta or even Aesop. They all use the same Ad agency, I think.
"Relief is just a swallow away" © or is that belief
I am reminded of the "choose life" billboard with a picture of a smiling baby saying,"At eight weeks I had fingerprints." It never mentions that it also had gills and a tail.
ReplyDeleteCapt.,
ReplyDeleteConsider the dinos of the field, they piffle not neither do they spin.... (Piffling requires more RAM than most of us have.)
Captain, Dino, and All
ReplyDeleteMy imperfect memory no longer recalls the precise quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but it goes something like this:
Words spoken by our space-time traveler upon awakening, "What makes me different from the cosmic dust?" In response, a voice crackles over the Deep Space speakerphone: "At least your dust gets a chance to sit up and take a look around."
Does that mean every pulsating life form is a spec of the Universe dimly consciousness of itself? Humble clams shivering in their shell would never stoop to the level of those crass, in-your-face faithful singing Hosannas - so unworthy even for Hollywood.
Here is a word of advice from your resident cephalopod: Never, never fall asleep next to a giant bean pod. It might be a fundamentalist or a Republican.
In the mean time, smile and always keep yourself well fed. Remember, we’ve got C R U S T A C E A N S !!!
Nameless - Nodding my head, tipping my hat, and smiling! ;)
ReplyDeleteNameless - Tipping my hat, nodding my head, and smiling! ;)
ReplyDeleteOcto,
ReplyDelete"In the mean time, smile and always keep yourself well fed. Remember, we’ve got C R U S T A C E A N S !!!"
But they're not Kosher.
Dino,
"Consider the dinos of the field, they piffle not neither do they spin"
Ah, but what about the Spinosaurus? And if there was no Pifflesaurus Rex who danced to the Jailhouse Rock, did not the Checkersaurus do the Twist?
Jono,
I see billboards informing us in their captious way that a foetus has a heartbeat in three weeks or thereabouts. So does an earthworm, of course and now that life has been "created" from raw chemicals in a test tube, perhaps we will soon be told that writing down our human collections of C, T, A and G's makes the piece of paper sacred and possessed of a "soul" which must be baptised to free it of it's "sins" before we can legitimately kill it.
But sure, human cells do the same job of recapitulating phylogeny as do chickens, who retain the genes for a long theropod tail and teeth. God is such a trickster, you know -- or is it just the people who make a living by putting words in his mouth.