Creation: Intelligently Designed, Yet Completely Lacking Compassion

Confession: I never saw Ben Stein's movie. It got horrible reviews, and just looked dumb. Yet, I have a few friends who have defended this movie to me. These friends know more than enough science to earn my respect. So, maybe I'll see the movie some day. Doubtful, but maybe.

So here are a few of my problems with the whole idea of intelligent design:

First, the whole idea of intelligence is a very human concept. It is anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, which are fancy ways of saying we can't imagine anything better than ourselves, so therefore God must be mostly like us. It's a bad form of logic. We are reported to be created in the image of God, so whatever we are, or want to be, God must be as well. I don't particularly care to argue that God isn't intelligent, only that the concept of intelligence means that God's ways are basically just like our ways . . . which is an assumption I'm pretty sure every major religion contradicts in one way or another.

My second, and more significant, problem with intelligent design is that creation is overflowing with sickening forms of irony. My biology professor did a wonderful job of pointing this out. Bare with a little science for the moment: There are many different forms of "sugar chains". Two of the most common are starch and cellulose. Starch is the digestible variety found in potatoes, corn, etc. Our stomach has enzymes which can break starch down into individual sugars, which we can consume for food. Cellulose on the other hand is made from the exact same sugars as starch only the way they are joined together is different. Because of this difference, the enzymes in our stomachs are useless to break down cellulose.

Why does this matter? Because 95+% of the "sugar chains" produced in nature are of the cellulose variety. Meaning that if the human stomach was endowed with a single extra enzyme to break down cellulose, hunger would never have been known in the history of the human race. Yet here we are in a world where so much suffering occurs due to the lack of sugar. Like people dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean, it is another sense in which we are surrounded by what we need but are impotent to use it.

If our world is "intelligently" designed in the human sense of the word, then the designer is a sadist. This is far from the only example of brutal irony which a scientific look at nature has to offer, but I think it will do.

This is not to say that I don't also get what i.d. advocates are driving at. I am also acquainted with the sense in which this is all a watch, and so it is logical to assume a watchmaker. Taking a statistics course is more than sufficient to realize how utterly ridiculous it is that 'life' exists at all. It seems quite obvious to me that there is some sort of force in the universe that organizes things in absurdly complex ways. There are so many things in our world that, were they to differ in the slightest from the way they are, life as we understand it would be totally impossible.

Only, when we try to cast human categories on this organizing force, on God, we are left with blasphemous implications that I do not think can be avoided.

Studentianity

Homily:

I have been forcibly converted. I now reluctantly practice two religions that I can't decide how much I believe in.

A while back a friend of mine had showed me a link to an article about some random African country where they had introduced a trillion dollar note. Inflation had progressed to the point that you needed a trillion dollars to buy a sack of rice. Meanwhile I go to a school where it is necessary to earn a 3.94 GPA to attain high honors. If one makes a 3.93 then one is deemed to have attain mediocre honors. I imagine a 3.9 is necessary for regular honors, but they don't talk about that as they would rather not admit that such a level of stupidity actually exists.

Grade inflation. One of thousands of examples of the complete absurdity of modern education.

This last week I survived my first round of tests with two A's and two B's, the latter driving me to the edge of suicidal despair(in the educational sense . . .chill). I know how ridiculous this is. Why the hell should two B's mark the end of my scholarly life. Yet here is my new religion, one which perpetually proves that no one is good enough except for those who have allowed the university system to consume their soul in its entirety.

Basically I'm just tired. Tired of one damn hurdle after another. I came back to school because I wanted the skills to help people, but instead I've obtained an assortment of arbitrary knowledge that allows me to reduce tangible reality to a math equation. Behold the University! The great fountain, effusing joie de vivre.

In other words, I've decided that the Messiah had better come soon, else I take the first escape route I can find. (new major: pyramid scheming . . anyone care to lend me some money to "invest"?)

In the name of the Professor, the Textbook, and Holy Competition.
Amen.