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.