Not so Intelligent, Intelligent Design

I love the BBC. Its hard core real shit. None of that Americanized Protestant washed media jambalaya. No, they say it how it is. Today’s headlines read:

The world's top scientists have joined forces to call for "evidence-based" teaching of evolution in schools.

A statement signed by 67 national science academies says evidence on the origins of life is being "concealed, denied, or confused" in some classes.

Stuff like that really gets me thinking...

I was raised in a very Catholic family where neither God nor creation was up for open discussion, let alone challenge. My family believed that creation like all things began during the time of Genesis. Forget fossil records or the carbon dating of items that contradict the Christian account of things. Such questions were a faux pas. I accepted that the earth and all life including man was a one week creation by the Almighty. According to the good book, the dinosaurs never existed, so forget you ever went to the Museum of Natural History, and woman, not man, thanks to a rib was last in the creative chain of events.

I had a really hard time buying into all of this. I once told my family that I thought that God was perhaps something that people made up, sort of like Santa Clause, to force us to be good. For this I was sent to weekly bible classes, which only furthered my disapproval of theological vagueness and cosmological questioning. This resulted in a life long continuum of open questions, a not-so-easy feat considering my spiritual beliefs and deo-centric cosmological understanding of the universe.

The problem lay not in wanting to choose between Creationism and Darwinian sides, but in finding a middle ground that would accommodate my deep desire for a God and the irrefutable findings of the scientific world. I was faced with many hard questions. What made it most difficult was not the accessible scientific and philosophical theories available. The real challenge was in the aspect of challenge itself. To entertain say for example Darwinist theory, one is required a momentary abandonment of fixed cosmological resiliency, no matter how absurd. How could I even begin to question cosmological shenanigans of human construction, let alone a spiritual force I based my life around, a three letter word I am programmed to capitalize?

So I asked of myself, Is the idea of intelligent design really that intelligent?

God and evolution do not seem to mix well. We seemly have Darwin to thank for this. It however wasn’t Darwin’s intention to start an anti-god catalyst of sorts. He was not against the idea of a God. What his findings resulted in was a Godless theory of evolution. It is simply a theory that allows for the possibility of a deity without blinding ourselves to observable truths, the likes of genes and fossil records, the best supporters of godless evolutionary theory.

The previously mentioned provide a strong case against theories of intelligent design. Intelligent Design in fact only seems applicable to man’s toying with the natural state of things. For example, where is the hand of God during man’s selective breeding of certain animal breeds? Can we justifiably argue that God intended for the creation of Cocker Spaniel, Great Danes, and Chihuahuas, non reproductive donkeys, ligers or other hybrids?

Natural selection has indeed become more than biological phenomenon. Man has been able to learn from nature’s long process and began its own process of un-natural selection which results in most of the new and hybrid species of plant and animal life which one day might even take the place of many of its weaker Eden originating cousins.

Gene variation is another great indicator that life originated as a long process of mutation as opposed to the result of an unseen deity’s one week fling with creation. Biological variation is endless. The fossil record indicates that many of the living species of today are merely the descendents of similar species no longer present. Genes provide a much more conclusive and believable explanation then Fundamentalist and Creationalist arguments. One can literally trace genetic code all the way back to most primal of single celled organisms. Random mutation and heritable variation are much easier to swallow then all of life, including T-rex and platypus, being created when the earth was four days old. After all, life did not simply subside and become a fixed celestial happenstance.

Life continues to take its own shape. It molds to fill niches, to specialize a beak for a certain flower, to warm the skin as climates change, every now and again to produce a needless cancer or the beneficial resistance to a certain synthetic strain of man-made antibiotic.

All in all, it is easy to accept that there was an unseen hand responsible for present day life. This was not however the unseen ethereal makings of the heavens but the process of time. If God is to be considered an unseen force which has no physical properties, then perhaps the law of time is as close to Godly creative force as we might explain. Time, being the alpha and omega, its starting point the big bang and its ending although plausible will forever, like that of intelligent design, remain improvable.

The Bible says, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18) and so is the ongoing sporadic, at times purposeful, variations of the tree of life. It is the constant change of time and variables that hold true to our abstract notions of divinity but ultimately not divinity alone.