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I am currently reading an anti-Darwinism book that was beside my bed when I arrived; a tactful message from a Christian mother. My family is generally very good about not bashing me over the head with crucifixes or making me openly repent my sins when I come home. They make it hard to be indignantly atheist, or agnostic, or pantheist, or whatever I happen to feel like each morning. I figured I would give the book - The Case for a Creator - a shot as a show of good will. And, to be honest, the issue of where Everything came from is probably worth a few hours away from TV Christmas specials.

All I really knew about Intelligent Design was that its proponents all believe crazy shit like humans and dinosaurs built villages together and had wacky adventures with God. It's kind of a common conception. If you check out the wikipedia entry, the article makes it quite clear that ID is at direct odds with science: it's "junk science", it can't be tested, and so forth. Intelligent Design is a theory that has been painted up quite nicely as religious insanity - the idea that perhaps the incredible complexity of everything that lead to humanity's birth wasn't random chance or autodidactic ordering. What a fucking nuts idea, right?

And so our only reasonable alternative is Darwinism. Well, Darwinism is pretty old. The man didn't know about DNA or detailed cellular biology, for example. He didn't know that the primordial soup everyone loves to reference didn't really offer very good chances for initial formation of amino acids, let alone the proteins needed for cell life. They were fucking ultra-slim chances, actually, like the odds of me eating your cat someday with a pair of tweezers. Only your cat has to be coloured purple first, for some reason. Darwin basically put forth his ideas, which fit nicely with the evidence he had at hand, and hoped the future would prove him right.

Rather doubtful, our book says. Darwinism has trouble with pre-cellular formation but it also has trouble with the Cambrian explosion, where most major classifications of animals emerged in a relatively short span of time. Where are the fossils that display evolution here? But, on the other hand, where is God? And this is where Darwinism and Intelligent Design come, snarling, face-to-face: there isn't enough evidence, so you need to tweak facts this way and that to support your macro-theory. You rely on faith - faith in God, faith in naturalist explanations for everything. The primary difference is that religious faith has already been dressed up as ignorant, whereas scientific faith is somehow more nobly rigorous. You know the evidence is there, you're just... waiting for it. Faith.

The Case for a Creator basically builds a litany of evidence pointing to the massive improbability of human life developing by random chance. DNA is an incredibly (intelligent?) system. Cellular mechanics are irreducibly complex systems, beyond a natural selection explanation. The Earth is in a fortuitous location in the galaxy for developing life, safe from supernovae exploding in spiral arms and out of reach of the hungry black hole gnawing at the center. Our solar system is designed to protect the Earth: Jupiter and Mars shield us from extra- and inter-stellar particles; the moon keeps our rotational tilt steady. The laws of physics would crush us like bugs if tweaked a fraction one way or another. All of this, the book argues, adds up to a conclusion which can never be empirically proven but can be inferred: that things were unfairly skewed in our favour. Now who could've done that?

Intelligent Design will never gain mainstream acceptance from "intelligent" people. No way. In a scientific age in which science sets the standards for what defines factual information (SCIENCE!), even the best philosophers and logicians will fall short of convincing most people to accept something without a gigantic test-tube of physical proof. Inference is rendered impotent by cynicism, and it's pretty easy to be cynical about faith when there are people out there making creationist theme parks about dinosaurs and cavemen being friendz 4ever. Stupid people believe without knowing, smart people know without believing. Just get together and have babies, already. Then we can see if natural selection is for real.

Posted by Chris at 03:53 PM >> Commentations (1)