Unintelligible Design

One problem with being as smart as I am is that people are always asking for my opinions on things. I get asked all the big questions, like "Are you even listening to me?", "Where are you going with this?" and "Are you about finished?"

The other day someone asked me whether I believed in evolution or intelligent design. I told him that I believed that evolution and intelligent design were two sides of the same coin: the cold, rational, scientific side and the warm, ignorant, superstitious side. As I understand it (and I've read a lot of letters to the editor in my local paper), intelligent design is a theory that looks at all the things we've figured out about the universe using science, and then looks at all the stuff we haven't figured out, and says, "Holy crap, this just isn't working. What other options do we have?"

You may be thinking, "Wait are minute. Are you saying that you can look at the wonder of creation all around you and not see evidence of an intelligent hand at work?" Well, to be honest I spend a lot of my time driving to and from the San Francisco bay area, and I'm not even sure there's an intelligent entity guiding the construction of the California highway system.

The problem with intelligent design is that it posits a universe that is so intrinsically ordered that we can't possibly explain it except by appealing to a higher intelligence. In other words, it says that the universe makes so much sense that we can't make any sense of it. That's a little like saying that a pattern is so complex that it never repeats, or that Nickelback is so popular that no one listens to them any more.

I think this theory was first put forth by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in regard to the babelfish, a creature so perfectly suited to its one purpose (translating speech from one language to another) that its existence could not possibly be explained by chance. The atheist counters that if God existed he would never have provided such clear proof of his existence, so the babelfish therefore disproves the existence of God. As I recall, the atheist goes on to prove that black is white and white is black, and gets himself killed at the next intersection. The only real difference between Douglas Adams' version and the more recent formulations of this theory is that Adams is a lot funnier.

It's too bad there's no such thing as a babelfish, because it would provide the perfect showcase for intelligent design proponents to fail to make their case. The fact is that if something is ordered, then it follows a set of rules, and if it follows a set of rules, then it can theoretically be understood by a rational being. There's no such thing as an order that is too ordered to be explained. Or does that make too much sense?

Now I know that you're not stupid, but let's imagine that a stupid person is reading this, and is thinking to himself*, "Isn't it possible that there is an order above what human beings can comprehend, so that the universe makes sense to God, but not to us mere humans?" I'll admit that this is a possibility. In fact, there is a word commonly used to describe a mysterious order that makes sense to supernatural beings but is beyond what human beings can comprehend. That word is magic.

The problem with magic is that it looks a lot like nonsense to the uninitiated. It takes an expert, say a shaman or witchdoctor, to tell actual magic from garden-variety nonsense. What generally happens is that you call up one of these experts for a little career advice, and the next thing you know you've been overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Mystics may have their uses, but I'd take my chances on an atheist with penicillin.

Do I believe in an intelligent entity who stitched together the fabric of the cosmos? Yes, I do. In fact, I believe He did such a good job that we're never going to find the seams, no matter how hard we try. My reaction, when I ponder the size and complexity of the cosmos, is the same as that of most sensible beings. Unfortunately, "Holy crap" doesn't qualify as a scientific theory.


*Note the lack of gender-neutrality when discussing stupid people.


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