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"Intelligent Design"
Promotes Ancient Heresies!
And Implies A Diabolic Creator
By Jim Scanlon
Camouflage
The long struggle of biblical fundamentalist Southern Baptists against
evolution and the teaching of that subject in public schools, has risen to a
new level of contention with the election and reelection of one of their own,
George W. Bush, an Evangelical, with their support and the support of other
like minded churches of the religious right.
Their rigid belief system based on the ancient Semitic creation myth of a
supreme power, with human characteristics, creating the universe and all life
on earth, in six days, has utterly failed to gain any support in scientific
circles and is widely accepted only among the uneducated and willfully ignorant
public. This new effort to obstruct and limit science education is akin to the
Taliban and other Muslim fanatics to impose the sharia, a harsh and brutal
interpretation of Islamic law, rigidly based on a holy book.
Biblical creationists have now repackaged their largely ignored
"scientific creationism" theory as "intelligent design,"
which is a theological assertion disguised as science to discredit the
scientific consensus on the evolution of life, which they call "Darwinism."
Charles Darwin presented an extended argument based on observations and
thought and explained in great detail in a book 148 years ago. It is a if
nothing happened in Biology between 1856 and now. Intelligent Design is a
statement, an empty theory, mimicking the collective scientific work of Darwin and thousands of other naturalists
and scientists.
In nature, mimicry is when one species evolves to look like another to fool
predators.
Survivalism
Intelligent design holds that living organisms are too complex to have arisen
by blind chance resulting from random mutations and this complexity implies
design by an intelligent agent.
Crudely, Darwin proposed that organisms tend to
overpopulate their environment and this leads to competition among individuals
for a limited food supply. Over time, small changes occur which affect the
success of reproduction. Any changes that help an individual survive to
reproduce would be preserved in the next generation, and so on. Over extremely
long periods of time small changes would add up, eventually leading to the
formation of new species and eventually to the observed diversity of life on
earth and in the fossil record.
"Darwinism" evolved from a simple, incomplete beginning into a
vast accumulation of supporting data amassed by amateurs, naturalists and
scientists, following more, or less strictly, the rules of science. The result
formulated in the 1920s to 1950s is the "Neo Darwinian Synthesis."
Time and time again new observations have been found to be consistent with it.
It has been found useful and not false-which is not the same as
"true."
All scientific facts are always provisional and modifiable. Overturn the
consensus and you will be showered with honors and riches. But stickers on high
school text books and threats by pious preachers and school boards won't do
it. They can shut people up but they can't modify or teach science.
When Darwin expounded his ideas, there wasn't
much of a fossil record to support it, there was no molecular information,
scientific estimates of the age of the earth were nowhere near long enough, the
evolution of matter from simple hydrogen and helium was unknown, the role of
genes and DNA was unknown. Confirmation, always provisional, came with time.
His core ideas survived, with modifications, with every scientific upheaval.
Probably the most important advance was in genetics, the mechanism that
presently allows scientists to precisely manipulate genes to reliably produce
new forms of individuals. Darwin knew
nothing of this aspect but he is a convenient "punching bag."
This biological synthesis has been supported from observations in geology,
biochemistry and biology, which includes medicine, and has transformed our
world-for better and for worse. Science survives by challenging authority,
observation, collecting information, cooperation, following procedures and
changing. Religions survive by obedient submission to authority, charismatic
leaders and rigid dogma. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages for the
survival of the system.
What Kind of Intelligence?
If one accepts that life on earth was designed by an intelligent designer,
it seems reasonable to ponder what is mean by "intelligent." The
exquisite structure of the eye is usually mentioned as being so complex as to
require an intelligent agent. Birds, fish, insects and mollusks all have more
or less complex eyes or light sensitive areas. Some species are born with eyes
and lose them as they develop because they don't need them where they live.
Our eyes work a lot like those of most vertebrates, including fish, and we
bear and raise our young in similar ways to many of them. We like most animals
and plants are divided into those that produce eggs and those that produce
sperm (pollen). We fertilize our eggs like them, like, "the birds and the
bees." One wonders why we are so sensitive about our animal kinship? We
don't seem to recognize any kinship with plants and fungi etc.
No one denies that there is competition, or that there is a struggle for
resources in "the jungle out there," or that there is competition for
sexual partners. In animal species where the male has a penis it is inserted
straightforwardly into a receptive female where fertilization takes place.
With Dragonflies, which have survived for hundreds of millions of years,
their reproductive system involves "sperm competition," in which the
male first removes any sperm already in the female from previous copulations.
The penis of the male is shaped (designed) to facilitate removing the sperm of
its predecessors.
It seems easier to imagine this sort of design occurring
"naturally" or randomly, like all the extravagant, weird secondary
sex characteristics and mating displays one sees among birds, seals and
baboons, it is hard to imagine an intelligent mind or agent planning these
things.
Good To Eat!
The "Head Fish," also known as the "Angler Fish," is an
exceedingly ugly, monstrous looking fish, which is sold commercially under the
yet another name, the Monk Fish. Usually it is 2-3 feet long and is just a head
with dreadful looking long teeth, soft spines and small fins. There is a kind
of fishing pole like growth on its head, which in the deep water variety,
contain light emitting bacteria. It lies motionless on the ocean floor until a
fish, sometimes fish much bigger than it, is attracted to the lure, or the
light and swims close to the huge spike tooth jaws. Because of it's nightmarish
appearance and tooth filled mouth, fishermen who pull them from the depths
call them "net devils."
These fish are also known as "poor man's lobster" and are
delicious to eat when served filleted. Males are small, 4-5 inches, and some
are said to be attracted to the bacterial light on the female's head. It is not
easy for a male to find a female in the inky blackness at the bottom of the
deep ocean so when a deep sea male finds a female he uses his specially
designed teeth to dig into the her body and chew his way inside her where he
spends the rest of his life absorbing her blood and fertilizing the eggs she produces
by the millions. In shallower water, where there is light to find a female the
relationship is less, shall we say, close.
In the depths, he lives in her and off her, almost as if he were a parasite.
She is sexually transformed into a post ovum hermaphrodite. From the minute he
bites his way into her, he changes, his body degenerates. His eyes, no longer
needed, grow smaller before disappearing altogether. His body fuses with hers.
The design works well, and is therefore "fit," the criteria for survival
and success in nature. But the design seems slap dash, make-do, crude, hardly
elegant when compared with, say, with an iPod. Just what kind of
"intelligent agent" would produce such creatures? Could one infer a
God of Justice? A heavenly Father who art in heaven? Is this what the Southern
Baptist Evangelicals want to teach their children and everyone's children? Or
would they prefer that their children and everyone's children not learn
anything that conflicts with their peculiar beliefs?
Parasitic Wasps
The female wasps is a dedicated, robot like mother. When she is ready to
lay her egg, she seeks out a spider, grub, or bug and injects a paralyzing
toxin through her hypodermic needle like ovipositor, very precisely into her
victim, paralyzing, but not killing it. She excavates a tiny tomb and buries
her prey with her egg. She seals the tomb. When her egg hatches it feeds on the
still living victim. When the food is consumed the larva spins a silk covering
and becomes a kind of little mummy. In it's silken sarcophagus it slowly
changes into an adult wasp, sheds its funereal wrappings, emerges from the tomb
and flies away like an angel. This goes on over and over again for millions of
years.
The design in this case works well but seems cruel and theatrically
spooky.
Twisted Parasites
The 21 January 2004 issue of Science reports on a
strange group of insects called twisted wing parasites. There are 596 species
of these insects identified so far but only from adult males who are caught
only during the brief time they emerge from their insect hosts to find a
female. Males and females are quite different. Males are the size of small
flies. The females are unsightly worm like grubs and remain inside their insect
hosts until they are ready to poke a body part out of their victim and receive
sperm from the male.
Reproducing under such circumstances seems miraculous but they obviously
manage to do it-a specimen has been found fossilized in Cretaceous (Age of
Dinosaurs) amber, at lease 65 million years old. Like the AIDS virus, their
presence does not provoke an immune response in their hosts. They parasitize 34
families of insects across 7 of the 32 orders. They have the smallest genome of
any animal yet observed.
These insects may benefit mankind by controlling insect pests that live on
coffee, rice and palm oil crops and those unwelcome newcomers to the US-fire
ants. You can read of creatures like this just about every week in issued of
the journals Science and Nature.
Fondness For Beetles
There are over 350,000 named species of beetles, the largest order in the
animal kingdom. In the US and Canada there are over 24,000 species. There are also thousands of
species of fungi that parasitize beetles.
When JBS Haldane, the great 19th Century biologist and theoretician was
asked what his studies of nature led him to conclude about the Creator, he
answered, "The Creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles."
Most beetles are scavengers, herbivores or predators but some live
parasitic lifestyles. Perhaps "impostor" is a better name than
parasite. They mimic the appearance of ants or termite evade the security of
insect colonies where they feed off their food and devour helpless larvae the
way criminals rob banks and burglarize houses in human society. What might one
conclude the "intelligent agent" had in mind here? Might one conclude
that the crime ridden slum ghetto of our cities are really part of the natural
world? That it legitimizes human criminal activity? The ancient Greeks believed
their Gods deliberately tortured humans as wanton boys torture flies for
amusement
Interesting designs? Yes! Successful designs? Yes! But-intelligent?
Sour Grapes
The promoters of "Biblical Six Day Creationism" and
"Intelligent Design" seem to focus their discontent and hostility on
"Darwinism" as if that "theory" hadn't changed in 148
years. For reasons that are unclear, they seem horrified at the thought of
kinship with and the thought of evolving from animals, particularly apes.
If they knew more about nature and science they might be offended much more
by other concepts, such as the evolution of matter, the formation of elements,
the ones that make up our bodies, by nucleosynthesis in the fires inside stars,
and the natural formation of heavy elements like uranium, only during
supernova explosions which occur only every few billion years or so, here and
there, in very large stars, much larger than our sun, which is a second
generation star, a sun made of suns past.
If they understood more about biology they would surely be horrified by the
scientific consensus on endosymbiosis which is that all life is one, from the
black sludge that forms in the drain of your sink, to whales in the sea and
birds of paradise in the jungle, not to mention all the extinct monstrous
animals that ever lived, and that all multi cellular animals, including us, are
composed of cells which evolved from free living bacteria that learned somehow
to live together as a complex unit and that these strange little colonies
strangely formed into all the living things that exist and ever existed.
Why would a designer bother?
How To Honor A Creator
This radical transformation, from simple bacteria to bacteria with a little
colony inside its walls is probably the best place to imagine a Creator,
intelligent or otherwise, except perhaps, for the "Big Bang," the
beginning of everything, according to that theory and also a theory hard to
test.
But humans, being what they are, and thinking as they do, as soon as you
mention the beginning of everything, someone will immediately ask what was
there before that beginning. If you say that God created the universe and just
let it go on its own, the deist position of our founding fathers, you posit a
detached, deadbeat kind of god who doesn't get involved. If one maintains that
everything was planned and has a purpose and the creator and designer of the
universe knows about and cares for John and Jane Doe, and Mr. and Mrs.
Anglerfish, you have a hard time maintaining that position when you study the
natural world. (You also have a hard time maintaining that position when you
study history!)
One can live a full and meaningful life in the mental bubble of the Semitic
bible and its offshoots, which have all, survived and prospered. The world view
of the primitive tribal people who created the bible is a world where the sky
is an inverted bowl over a pancake earth and no one saw or suspected the
bacterial world in them and on them, or knew of the existence of the Americas and its peoples. They didn't know
of sea floor spreading or mountain building. They didn't know the mechanisms of
rainfall or droughts or the icy worlds of the poles or what caused earthquakes.
Were the seven lean years and the seven fat years a hint of ancient El Ni–os?
Or bloody rainfall volcanic ash?
Viewed from today, that life seems limited like Mr. and Mrs. Anglerfish
living their designed lives together at the bottom of the deep, dark ocean
locked in an eternal copulation until death takes them both perhaps to a fish
market near you. Such a lifelong sexual embrace would be a fitting
reincarnation, if reincarnation were possible, for Muslim suicide bombers
murdering ordinary people on a corner in Baghdad, seeking the promise of extended, heavenly orgasms in his afterlife
with houries. (Please forgive the digression).
A Diabolic God
Invoking a supernatural designer for life on earth as a means of affirming
belief in an all powerful God who designed and created everything in the
universe is a presumption of ignorant frightened people whose intention is not
to honor a creator, but overpower and enslave free thought and expression. They
express by their revulsion of nature and all non sanctified sex the ancient
heresy that the natural world is evil and we are too and we all deserve to be
punished for living. They look forward with uncertain joy and hope for the
destruction of the world and they now have their hands on the weapons to
accomplish their desire.