O O Ø O O O O
Intelligent Designs
It was a dark and stormy night.
Well, early evening really, so not that dark. But it was a little stormy as I kicked back and started savouring the taste of my weekly pint. Suddenly, out of the night emerged a mysterious shadowy figure, who then proceeded to sit down at my table and order himself a drink.
“The problem with you Darwinists,” he started, “is that you’re all alike.”
Ah. Sweeping generalizations, and a confrontational tone. If I’m not mistaken, this little verbal barb was intended as a tossed gauntlet. It seemed this mysterious fellow wished to engage in some kind of intellectual discourse.
Well, it is Pint Day, now isn’t it?
“Actually,” I began dryly, “I consider myself more of a Scientific Agnostic.”
“Bah!” He continued unabated, “To you, animal diversity is the result of unguided, blind, unintended change!”
“Ah,” I interjected, realization dawning, “You’re one of those Intelligent Design folks, aren’t you?”
“Purposeless! Unguided, random processes can only produce purposeless and unintended outcomes!” he preached, starting to get into a flow.
“Purposeless! Unguided, random processes can only produce purposeless and unintended outcomes!” he preached, starting to get into a flow.
“Now wait a minute,” I barked, dropping my beer to the table to punctuate my interruption. “What about this?”
He paused, eyes dropping to my beer as he attempted to swallow that one. “Your beer?”
“My beer,” I continued, “my happy-hour beer. Here I am, drinking a beer during one of the week’s prime drinking hours. And these people are giving me a discount. A special price to come here and do something I was going to do anyway.”
“Er,” he started, clearly confused by my apparent non-sequitur.
“Why? Because they want me to come here.” I continued. “They know I’m going to drink beer on a Tuesday anyway, and they want to make their little establishment the most appealing to me, the consumer.”
“But, er, Darwin…” he tried.
“I’m getting there,” I assured him, pausing for breath, “This pub is part of a huge, undirected system regulating the movement of capital: the free market. And even though there’s nobody in charge, it is a highly efficient means of regulating supply and demand. From a high level, it seems almost like there’s an invisible hand guiding it. But down here in the trenches… ” I paused to take a sip from my spontaneous pint-shaped prop. “Down here in the trenches, it’s every capitalist for himself, acting out of self-interest.”
“Ah!” He pounced, sensing an opening. “But the profit motive is a simple system. Life is infinitely more complex. It simply could not have appeared by chance. It’s like finding a watch on a beach. As soon as you see it, you know it’s too complex to have been formed by anything other than design.”
Oh goody. The watch metaphor. The idea that one mind can “sense” the creative activity of another mind— a scientific argument if ever I have heard one.
“And if a medieval knight found a glow-stick on a beach, he’d know it was magical.” I murmured.
“Statistics,” he continued unabated, starting to get his groove back, “statistics can prove that life, the universe, and everything are designed.”
“Oh?” I asked, leaning back in my chair in preparation for the mathematical argument.
“The universe! It is precisely balanced! If the forces of gravity, or the charge of an electron were even slightly different, the universe wouldn’t exist at all!”
“If the universe didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be here to make that statement.” I said, flatly.
“But the probability…”
“The fact that you are here means that the probability of the universe existing, and supporting life is exactly one,” I finished.
“But the odds…”
“The average male releases 500,000,000 sperm per ejaculation. The odds of the exact sperm that made you being the one that gets to an egg is one in 500,000,000, times the probability of actually getting pregnant. But you are here. So the probability of that particular sperm having met that particular egg are exactly one. It doesn’t matter how improbable it seems.”
“And DNA! DNA is complex!” He started.
“Some more than others.” I finished. The implied insult flying on by.
“The probability of a single gene forming by chance,” he started again.
“Genes don’t appear spontaneously, or by chance,” I finished again.
“Exactly!” he shouted, triumphantly.
“And neither does Carbon dioxide and water. Unless you happen to mix baking soda and vinegar.”
“Er,” he stated, faint recollections of volcanos and childhood science fairs stirring in his consciousness.
“Probability arguments ignore the conditions of formation.”
“Er,” he stated, a little more desperately this time, then, thinking better of it, concluded with an “Ah.”
A partial victory. He had stopped talking. Yet, he was still sitting at my table. “So while you’re thinking on that,” I began, pausing to take a drink from my glass, “why don’t we talk about this whole Deists vs. Theists nonsense?”
My mysterious stranger’s face went pale. Curious gargling sounds started coming from the vicinity of his throat. At that moment, another unsuspecting customer walked past my table, heading in the general direction of the bar. With a shout of “Darwinist!” my mysterious stranger leapt out of his chair, and shot off in the same direction. Chuckling to myself, I returned to the all-important business of sipping on my beer.
“Intelligent designers,” I murmured to myself. “What will they think of next?”
Kjell Wooding
August 23, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXVIII
August 24th, 2005 at 8:59 am
But what about caffiene? It is unlikely that anything as useful as caffiene would have come about by accident! Its a dead give away, isn’t it!?
August 24th, 2005 at 10:44 am
Damn. You got me there.
August 27th, 2005 at 7:02 am
If I’m intelligently designed, why aren’t I better?
I prefer “Stupidly Designed”.
August 29th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
The problem is not the design, its the implementation. On paper it all looks good but in practicality everything degrades. If we don’t follow specific diet and excercise routines we degrade. Blame the intelligent designer for not testing enough prototypes in a real world sense. Sounds like a fool running things if you ask me.
August 30th, 2005 at 2:43 pm
What about all these nipples and appendices I seem to have?