INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN NATURE - no kidding?

research  by 

Poch Suzara

The creationists continue to amaze me. Specially those who insists that if there were no Creator, there would be no “intelligent design in nature.” Let’s examine, with a healthy dose of imagination, the creationists’ proposition. I should submit at once that if there were intelligent design in nature, such designs are as intelligent as the hairstyle of the evangelists preaching sacred dogmas, pigmas, and hogmas on television.

Let’s briefly explore “intelligent design” in the cosmos. How intelligent is it that everything out there, billions of galaxies are existing too far away from each other and traveling and getting farther every second away from each other? How are we to travel to the other planets and stars? Even nearby Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our Milky Way, is 2.2 million light years away (a light year is about trillion miles). One heck of a long and boring journey.  

Our own solar system, while relatively compact, is still a traveler’s nightmare. It takes our fastest probes years to reach the outer planets, and once we get there, we find not angelic nor demonic spacemen, but only find frozen rocks or giant balls of gas.  The point is: design implies a designer; but more than that, design implies purpose. It’s hard enough to prove that the universe was designed by a designer. What’s even impossible to prove is that the existence of the universe had a purpose. 

The inner planets are almost as inhospitable. Mars is a dead, airless, dry, and frigid planet. One day, however, with scientific intelligence, Mars will probably be terraformed to make it habitable for humans. Venus is caught in an endless loop of a runaway greenhouse effect. Mercury’s surface temperature is over 450 degrees Celsius.  Earth is our only home; but we have yet to learn to love our home planet earth. But thanks to our conflicting religious beliefs, we only love God in heaven up there by hating one another down here on earth.

Now comes the major premise of intelligent design - that life, specially, human life, is too complex to have just happened. If the creator had power, wisdom, and knowledge, it was shown by his creation of man. Unfortunately, we came not from among the best blueprint. In fact the creator failed to look at His master plan before starting work.  Look at the facts.   

First, if we admit the desirable aspects of nature as products of design, we must also admit the undesirable aspects of nature as products of design. After Adam and Eve, who was the designer who designed the Talking Serpent who caused the Fall of Adam and Eve? Oh well, let’s leave that behind. Now there’s the problem of sexual reproduction. Requiring two people to make babies is so inefficient, painful and messy. Sexual reproduction breeds not only children, but also contempt. The male contribution to the process of making babies is so insignificant. 

It is accomplished in just a few seconds. The female then spends the next nine months in discomfort waiting the birth. The male, on the other hand, gets on with his life bragging about his God-given erectability.

Now if the creator were an intelligent designer, Why would he just take a rib off Adam to design an Eve? Now look at babies born into this world. They come out of mother’s womb wet, hungry, crying, and indeed, as unbelievers of the faith. None of the baby boys born have one less rib than the baby girls. Now if circumcision were important to the creator, why did he put that extra foreskin in the boy’s genital to begin with?  Sounds unintelligent to me. But then again, why couldn’t the creator designed the human stomach exactly like that of the Boa Constrictor, (in order to survive, that snake needs only one full meal a month). In this way, with a better designed stomach - the 800,000,000 women and children throughout the world need not go to sleep hungry every night.

Next comes the fact that we are bipedal. That means when we are young we fall down a lot. And when we are old we fall down a lot. The other day, my best friend, who is neither young or old, but a devout Christian, fell down from bed and painfully broke his leg. And it wasn’t even his God-fearing wife who was with him in bed.

Man is intelligently designed? How come we can’t breath water?

Is that important? Think about it – what creator would make us so we can only breath oxygen, then puts us on a planet which is 78% water? Hello? Anybody home out there? The creator gave us a useless organ like the appendix, but couldn’t afford to throw in fins and gills as part of our physical nature so that we may live deep in the sea as well. All knowing and powerful, indeed.

We are intelligently designed?  From caducity to senility, we get sick, grow bald, get fat, lose our sense of hearing, teeth fall out, skin sag, bones become brittle, sexual performance fades, vision fails, arteries clog, senses become dull, memory becomes unreliable.  Children are born ignorant in that the priesthood industry takes advantage of the situation by making it even more ignorant for the glory of God in heaven.

Really, how so intelligent a design is the human body? Is it really a sacred temple of God? But the human body is also the happy home of some 2 billion germs, viruses, bacteria and other nasty little monsters trying hard everyday to kill vital human organs always at war against the human immune system. In the long run, however, as in cancer, a group of these  little monsters engages in a career of imperialism, and in bringing the rest of the human body to death, these little monsters would decree its own death too.

Most obviously the argument against intelligent design is the fact that we have a free will. We experiment. We observe. We discover. We think. We theorize. We disagree. We quarrel. We extrapolate. We make war against each other. If humans were the result of a master plan, the creator could have made us gifted not with a free will, but only with a good will. In this way, we need not doubt the existence of a creator or doubt the claims of his inspired writers of the bible. We could then learn to live peacefully and intelligently together as one big happy family exploring deeper the wonders in nature of which we not apart, but precisely a part of nature.

In the final analysis, intelligent design is an argument from ignorance. It is equivalent to the “true or false” or “none of the above” test category. Intelligent design is a sophisticated way of admitting “I don’t know.”  It is like asking: who designed the “turtle’s shell?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know.” “Therefore we both know that the creator designed the turtle’s shell.” Indeed, an intellectually honest person, when confronted with something he knows nothing about, will admit at once that he knows nothing about it. In the meantime, in order to conclude that an object was designed, we must first establish that it was manufactured. Therefore, in order to conclude that the natural universe was designed, we must first establish that it was manufactured by an intelligent manufacturer.

Nobody is perfect; but however scientifically well-informed many of us have become, the creationists would still insists that we all came from dust and unto dust we shall all return. But really, if the Creator made man in his own image and likeness, it follows that the Creator too is made of dust.  Now, isn’t it rather silly to pray to a Creator who is made of dust to save our silly souls that’s also made of dust?