Intelligent Design: It’s NOT Science!!

A long time ago, people used to believe that it was necessary to cut up a cow or a slave to make sure the Sun came up, because the Sun was a ball of fire being dragged across the sky by some god or spirit.

They didn’t know this for a fact, but there were apparently well-informed shamans or priests who said it was so. They believed it because they were told.

I believe the sun’s going to come up every morning, and I believe that it’s because the Earth is a huge spinning ball of rock orbiting the Sun, which is a massive ball of burning gas. I don’t know this for a fact, because I’ve never seen the Earth from space, but I believe it because plenty of people have seen it, and there are dozens of cool devices that have travelled all over the solar system taking pictures. I believe it because they told me, showed me and proved it to me.

Is there a difference between these two beliefs? Well yes there is. It’s called evidence. All my cows and slaves are intact, and the Sun still comes up every morning. I can go online, or to a library, or to Dad’s house, where he can get out all the photos he got when he worked at Space Track in the 60s, and I can look at photos and imagery from radio telescopes and so on. Until something comes along with better proof than we’ve already got, I’m sticking with the big balls of rock orbiting and spinning scenario.

People used to believe that the Earth and everything else was created in seven days. It was in the Bible, which is a pretty important book and mostly a very good read, and if you believed in God, well, you pretty much had to believe everything that was in His Book.

Then evidence, which had always been there by the way, got looked at properly by Charles Darwin, and the whole world changed. The proof is there, in every fossil and in every living thing, that we weren’t actually created, we just happened. Despite our sentience, our intelligence, our spirituality and everything else that makes humans good, we’re just a blip as far as the Earth’s concerned.

For some reason, the fact that we’re just some kind of accident gives great heartache to a lot of people. They feel that there must be some kind of Great Planner out there, who’s made all this for us, and is interested in what we’re doing with it, and has some kind of Plan for each of us.

I love the thought that we are a miracle, but I think that making a Creator of some kind responsible for it all actually cheapens the miracle. If you were able to go back in time to when the first strands of RNA fell together, there’s just no way you could calculate the number of mutations that would have to occur, the number of life forms that would have to come and go, and the number of chances that had to go our way. Which amoeba floated too close to the surface of the ocean and died, which one developed a slightly better-functioning gut, which ugly fish flopped onto the shore and discovered that it could breathe air; there are lots of dead links in the fossil record, creatures that existed for a time, but just went nowhere, and it could’ve been as simple as the right individual escaping from a predator.

Think about how you came into being. About forty million sperm swam into a hostile environment (the birth canal) where most of them died. A few hundred made it as far as the uterus and the fallopian tubes, where it just so happened that this was one of the four or five days in twenty-eight that an egg was present in the right place. One of the sperm managed to push its way in and fertilise the egg. The egg was positioned perfectly in a functioning uterus, and your mother was healthy enough that the egg developed into you. You weren’t one of the two in three fertilised eggs that self-terminated due to one of the dozens of reasons that zygotes fail. You survived all the risks associated with developing in the womb, and further survived the ordeal of childbirth (somewhat less of an ordeal in the past hundred years or so than it was in the Middle Ages, for instance, where birth was a fifty-fifty chance at best for both mother and child).

You survived childhood without serious disease or malformity, and no fatal accidents befell you (or your parents) while you were still too young and feeble to care for yourself. And here you are, a sentient being, perhaps with children of your own, reading this. You’re a winner.

When you consider that every single one of your human ancestors came into being the same way, in the face of far more environmental and medical risks, it makes you even more of a miracle. Consider what your DNA’s been through to get this far, and when you really think about it that’s a lot more interesting than Creation.

Some People of The Book have pretty much accepted that the Seven Days thing, the Garden of Eden, the Flood and a lot of other stories in the Old Testament are just Bronze Age myths. It hasn’t shaken their belief in God, and doesn’t stop them being decent human beings.

However, there are plenty of others who for some reason simply can’t accept that the Bible is anything other than historical fact. Thanks to this second group, we get to the point of this article: Intelligent Design.

Faced with an undeniable fossil record and a couple of hundred years of stunning scientific achievement, they have to admit that evolution does happen, just not in the way that science describes.

They put ID forward to show that we, and everything else on the planet, have actually been designed, with us as the obvious end-point of perfection. They call it science, and that’s what really pisses me off. IT’S NOT SCIENCE!! It’s just wilful ignorance. ID’s central tenet is that all this is simply too complicated, we don’t want to have to think about it, it’s just easier to believe that Somebody is Responsible.

It’s too hard to think about how the human eye could have evolved for example, so let’s just say it’s just too complicated, Somebody must have made it. They call this Irreducible Complexity.

From a mutation in part of a cell wall that responds to light, you get individual cells whose sole purpose is to respond to light, then they start gathering in groups, then you get brain functions to process the data, then cones and lenses and all the other bits come along and improve it, and you eventually get the mammalian (and octopus) eye, or one of the seven other kinds of completely different eyes that evolved independently on this planet.

The eye was easy, particularly when you go on to point out that it actually collects everything upside down and our brain has to turn it right way up, and there’s a blind spot, and what Supreme Being would’ve made such a glaring error… ID proponents don’t embarrass themselves with that argument any more. Their latest cause celebre is a thing called the flagellar motor, which is a little whip that amoeba use to propel themselves around test tubes or wherever it is that amoeba hang out.

The flagellar motor is made of thirty different proteins, and experiments have shown that it simply will not work without all thirty in exactly that formation. Therefore, it couldn’t have evolved in bits, therefore it’s Irreducibly Complex, therefore Someone must’ve made it.

But that’s like looking at a bridge and assuming a whole lot of bridge parts just levitated themselves across the river, without any scaffolding or cranes. Once the bridge is up, all the scaffolding and cranes go away because they’re no longer needed, which is pretty much what happened with the flagellar motor – we don’t know what kind of scaffolding used to be around it, or if some or all of the thirty proteins used to be different proteins, but there are plenty of examples of such scaffolding to be found in nature.

So there are two competing theories around the flagellar motor – it just happened (like every other bit of every other life form on Earth), or Somebody made it. We evolutionists have supporting evidence for our theory (obsolete parts such as our own appendix), whereas ID’s theory is only supported by its complete lack of evidence (I can’t see the scaffolding, therefore it was never there).

We just happened, and that doesn’t concern me at all. I don’t need to believe that Someone Else has a plan for me, or a reason for my existence. I’m here, and the plan, as far as possible is mine.

And my wife’s of course.