1st
Intelligence Design
Now, Intelligent Design- a concept the Bush administration tried to enforce over all education boards around the country (and pathetically failed, if I may add)- has finally come up in my lovely book titled, Why Religion Matters.
After taking my Spiritual Heritage class for a few months, I came to acceptance with religion. Really.
I thought a thing like this would never happen, but it has. And I think it’s a good thing.
I can talk to my Christian friends and talk about God, the Bible, etc., and make it seem almost as though I believe in God. I don’t, but I can speak as though I do, by going through the concepts of the religions and the values associated with it, etc.
Which does not mean my skepticism has been quenched. Far from it, actually.
My honors seminar is made so that we can have “discussions,” which is dubbed as Religious Dialogues.
Which means we argue about religion in a civil way. (Quoteunquote)
And I have to say that I have questioned the Adam and Eve concept- how did they have kids, and their kids marry with their own sisters and brothers (incest is condemned in the Bible, I believe), and then go on again and again that way? There has to be genetic mutations. Inbreeding causes genetic mutations, usually for the worse- kids can be born with 6 toes on each feet, some recessive disease that became dominant, mental retardation, etc. etc.
As a product of that much inbreeding, how are we not mutated to the extent that we are unable to function?
(There is always the argument that we have mutated into something very low right now. Look at our terrible states!)
We (or I, actually, because no one could answer- not even the presenter), decided that mutations didn’t occur because Adam and Eve were children of God. So somehow, mutations didn’t occur in the direct descendants.
After all, almost the same thing could be said about monkeys becoming humans. Apparently our genes could all be traced back to 7 women. The billions of people we have in the world today, and we have had in the past, and we will in the future, could all be traced back to 7 women.
And then I complained about Noah and his Ark story. First of all, inbreeding galore. Seriously. Two of every animal? And the “God is always forgiving, always loving” story? Didn’t happen here- the whole freaking world drowned to death- even the innocent animals that didn’t do anything.
(There have been arguments that until Jesus came and preached and the New Testament was created, God was something to be feared, and he was not known as the benevolent, all loving, all forgiving creator.)
And I’m pretty sure God said to collect two of each species (some, 7, I think).
He didn’t give them to Noah. So where were the penguins? Did they evolve out of other birds?
(Obviously, this is my utmost concern.)
So, back to Intelligent Design. I do have to admit that I suck at writing cohesively. But then again, I’ve known that for a while… I can never write from top to bottom… Always skipping around everywhere. By the end, I don’t know what I was writing about and get everything so messed up.
In his novel, Houston Smith said:
More and more, scientists are finding that if the mathematical ratios in nature had been the slightest bit different, life could not have evolved. Were the force of gravity the tiniest bit stronger, all stars would be blue giants, while if it were slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs, neither of which come close to being habitable. Or again, had the earth spun in an orbit 5 percent closer to the sun, it would have experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, creating unbearable surface temperatures and evaporating the oceans,; while on the other hand, if it had been positioned just 1 percent farther out, it would have experienced runaway glaciations that locked earth’s water into permanent ice.
A very valid argument, I agree.
However:
Physicists of the stature of John Polkinghorne find it impossible to believe that such fine-tuning (and the apparent frequency with which it occurs) could have resulted from chance. They toss around improbability figures in the range of one in ten followed by forty zeros. For them, improbabilities of this order all but require us to think that the universe was designed to make human life possible, to which they add that design implies an intelligent intentional designer.
Unfortunately, I do not know who John Polkinghorne is, so his stature is unknown to me.
However, I am one of those, I guess without the stature, that such fine-tuning have resulted from chance.
I’m sure there were billions of failed cases. So this was the very small, improbable case that we are living on.
Something that is a very interesting observation that was also mentioned in Smith’s book:
[Jonathan] Wells earned a Ph.D. in theology at Yale University, writing his doctoral dissertation on nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies. His research convinced him that the conflict between Christianity and Darwinsm revolves around the issue of design. Christianity affirms that human beings were created in the image of God, while Darwinism claims that human beings were accidental by-products of an unguided natural process.
Which comes to the one of the things that put me off about Intelligent Design; the fact that they believe that the world was created for human beings- that we were created superior to other animals in order to rule this planet.
I don’t believe we were the chosen ones. The chosen ones who own the planet, because it was created just for us. Because we are God’s children and he loves us all. Enough to give us a whole planet with lots of water and greens and animals to devour.
How could we be with all the catastrophes we are causing? All the bloodshed, poverty, agony, destruction of ecology, exploitations of other animal species.
We aren’t special- we are just some animals that got the freakish idea that we were, and that we should be able to do whatever we want with the world because we can.
Maybe that’s the problem- the difference between “them” and “us.”
That we can destroy, we can rule, we can think.
Evolution seems like a really far-fetched idea, especially for people that do not believe it (Sarah Palin anyone?), and if I think about it in a very surface-only way, I can see the problems it may cause. For one thing, we are obviously not chimpanzees. I never want to be a chimpanzee.
Though you might find this article interesting: Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People?
There are many things that seem to separate us from those that are not humans. We have the ability to think in very complex ways that we have (at least as of yet) not been able to find in other animals.
But I don’t think that was a divine gift- I believe that it was just the way we evolved to adapt to the harsh environment to protect our minuscule, pathetic, slow, blind, deaf, weak body against the dangers of the world.
(By the way, most animals don’t like eating us anyways because we are so gross tasting.)
We don’t have the divine authority to do whatever we want and destroy everything. Really. I don’t know who gave you the idea, but no, we should not be taking all this from the world- just because we can does not mean we should.
The equilibrium the planet had sustained for hundreds of billions of years crumble in mere millions.
It’s disturbing. And as time goes by, the worse it becomes.
I really do think the world is going to end soon. We need to speed up that thing about immigration to Mars…
By the way, if you’re interested in Intelligent Design.
