Dismantling Intelligent Design.

Intelligent design. What is this irksome little imposter dressed up in science clothing? Is it, as the propagators of the ‘theory’ suggest, a controversy worth teaching? Or, rather, is it merely a controversy only within their minds? The latter tends to be more true, but the simple truth is that ID advocates want to inflate its status merely by postulating a controversy where none exists.

Intelligent Design rests on two things: ignorance and refusal. By keeping the public – i.e. the American public – in the dark about science, they serve to keep the public distrustful of science. Generally, ID advocates refuse to acknowledge the fact that natural things giving off the apparent illusion of design are not the end products of design, but rather of slow, incremental evolution.

Intelligent Design isn’t a ‘theory’ – the very association of the phrase ‘ID’ with ‘theory’ serves to discredit the word. There are two ways of typically defining a theory:

1. Something that serves to explain a phenomenon or a set of phenomena through evidence and experiment;  
2. A simple postulation about something couched in nothing but speculation.

Evolution isn’t a theory; it’s a scientific fact – a ‘type 1’ theory. There is so much evidence that it’s almost staggering: fossil records, population distribution data, anthropological and archaeological data, genetic distribution data – and all of this come upon independently, in many locations, all across the planet.

The only tenet of ID is ‘irreducible complexity’. All this means is the refusal to accept that something, like an eye, for example, could come about by chance over millions of years. Certain things, say ID advocates, are too complex to have come about by chance; they must have been divinely worked. Intelligent Design, however, overlooks one thing: when looked at carefully, life seems to be a hotchpotch of mediocrity. The human eye, for example, has two massive flaws: light has to travel through blood vessels dangling above the retina before it’s processed, and the human eye has a massive blind spot. What this means is that the human brain has to artificially ‘fill in’ the blanks – in effect, part of the visual image we see isn’t actually there at all.

It’s rather telling that octopodes have no such problems. What does this mean? Are we to take it that if there is a deity, or several, then it, or they, value octopode eyes over human eyes? We are left with one of four immediate possibilities:

1. There is no deity or deities;
2. There is a deity, or several, and it or they prefer octopodes over humans;
3. There is a deity, or several, and it or they are incompetent;
4. There is a deity, or several, and it or they don't care about human beings at all.

I haven't yet finished with the science, but I feel it's time to progress to more esoteric matters. This is usually the point at which I become foamy at the mouth because of the self-assertive arrogance of the Christian right. They assume that their god is the one true god, and therefore base their so-called 'theory' on a bronze-age, immoral, self-contradictory, laughable piece of literature called the Bible. This is apparently the book from which they derive their morality and sense of the world. At this point, I have to ask myself: really? Have they read this book? Surely we haven't been reading the same Bible.

Religion is based on two things: fear and vanity - and the one usually comes from the other. After developing self-consciousness some 200,000 years ago, we suddenly became awed by the world - and very frightened. Suddenly, we were plunged into an unsafe world full of rain and lightning and thunder and forest fires and predators scowling away in the night. We needed something to hold onto - something to give us security and meaning; we needed something that wasn't there.

The earliest religions were all forms of animism - in this worldview, everything - from a rock, to a tree, to a cloud - took on a 'spirit'. Nature was revered and worshipped, and everything seemed deeply mystical and holy. The first religions pertaining to deity worship were overwhelmed with female deities. This coincided with the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years BC. When hunter-gatherers first started settling into agricultural communities, they depended on harvests for their livelihoods. Some knew to measure the seasons by the stars, and others didn’t. All, however, saw the Earth (insofar as they could meekly perceive it) as being female: rain entered the soil (like sperm) and after a period of gestation, the seeds sprouted and grew into crops.

Religions were dominated by female worship until communities really started to develop. Often, they would expunge their resources or take note that their resources were quite scarce, so they would rove into foreign lands in search of wood, minerals, water and food. Of course, sometimes they came upon foreign peoples who had entirely different gods. Naturally, conflict often ensued because of the tribal nature of these early settlers. After a few millennia, all religions tended to be pre-occupied with the worship of male deities that more represented the warrior nature of their societies or civilisations – although some still retained some female deities.

These polytheisms naturally progressed into monotheisms – the first of which was Judaism. From Judaism, Christianity and - later - Islam emerged. These religions retained their tribal motifs, and their subjects learned to look at people of other faith backgrounds as being somehow 'other' and not a part of their god's people.

What strikes me about religion is the short-sightedness and self-centredness of its subjects. They all assume that there is a deity and that this deity takes the form of a human. This is so, naturally, because humans are self-conscious beings seeking meaning in a world that cares not for the needs of any individual species. It's quite conceivable that if, for example, rabbits were to suddenly develop self-consciousness they would design gods in rabbit form, and each other species would do the same with respect to their physiognomies.

By postulating the existence of a god or gods, people only serve to compound the issue. The First Cause argument shoots itself in the foot: something capable of designing complex things must be complex in itself - probably more complex than its creations. Such a being couldn't have just come about by chance, surely. Therefore, such a being - i.e. God - would've had to be created. But who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator? A usual riposte is to speculate that God has always existed. But if God has always existed, then the universe has surely always existed. And if the universe has always existed, one doesn't need to bring a deity into the equation.

By bringing in an intermediary - i.e. a god - one serves to complicate the matter - whereas evolution solves the problem in a simple and elegant way. Something cannot have existed anterior to the big bang. Also, a deity can't reside within the limitations of the universe because then such a deity would be part of the creation (and thus cannot be creator). So, Intelligent Design has no basis in reality and is as dead as the First Cause argument and the god of the Old Testament. Evolution solves all of these problems; a deity merely serves to create confusion where none exists.