Intelligent design gets a plain language pasting!
The Nurse has always thought the concept of god was a bit silly. As a small child in the ’70s she was sent home from junior school with a note saying that a girl who didn’t believe in god shouldn’t come to the christmas party. But she stuck to her guns.
So, a lifelong atheist, The Nurse has followed the US’s acrimonious intelligent design / creationism vs. evolution / Darwinism debate with mounting alarm. Those who control US educators are engaged in a fierce battle about whether or not intelligent design should be taught in schools as a viable alternative to evolution. And in some states, the god squad’s winning. At the same time, science funding in the US is being cut willy-nilly.
Baffled and infuriated by the endless, tedious twists and turns the debate is taking, The Nurse was delighted to discover a beautifully simple expression of the entire argument. A few sentences that encapsulate the fundamental and unarguable truth.
Heartfelt thanks and admiration, therefore, go to Ken Ligar of Chester, Connecticut, for writing this letter to New Scientist (issue 2660, 14th June 2008):
“While I am not a believer in the theory of intelligent design, I see no reason why it cannot be taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution – as long as it is kept neutral to any specific religion. The entire lesson can be summed up quite easily and will not burden the students with difficult concepts or homework. Here is a sample lesson text that can be used by any teacher: ‘The theory of intelligent design states that an omnipotent being created the universe and everything in it for reasons that we cannot, and are not meant to, comprehend. There is no quantifiable evidence to support this theory, there are no hypotheses that can be proven or disproven using this theory, and it offers no predictive ability for any past, present or future events. OK, now let’s move on to the theory of evolution.”
Now, that’s not to say that The Nurse has no soul. In fact she enjoys a lively and fulfilling spiritual life. The Nurse has invented her own religion, where deities are irrelevant. And, despite being imprisoned in this hell-hole with all these effing nutters for so many years, she isn’t a bad person. Just ‘troubled’.
Come on folks… be sensible. Teach religion if you must. But PLEASE don’t teach it as an alternative to evolution! That’s just mad.
Intelligent design gets a plain language pasting! wrote,
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Link | July 14th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Import from China wrote,
Nice post, you got some good points there – thank you.
Link | July 20th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Terry the Bastard wrote,
Well said – it’s about time religious nutters simply fucked off -
Link | July 22nd, 2008 at 8:49 am
Herb Shallcross wrote,
I know lots of apparently rational peolple who practice some religion or other. I do not, but I do celebrate the cultural event of Christmas. It would require incredible historical ignorance not to realize the enormous contributions religion has made to our world.
That doesn’t prove or disprove any of it.
The possibility of intelligent design has some things to recommend it.
For even the simplest life to reproduce itself requires that an incredibly complex set of instructions on how to perform a large array of processes must be transmitted, accurately. Redundancy, error checking and other processes to prevent degradation of the data had to be included right from the start, or be developed in a very small number of generations or even single-celled life would have died out quickly. The ‘blue screen of death”, to be sure! It is possible that single-celled life failed miserably hundreds of millions of times before, by random chance, these sophisticated protections were put in place. Remember, if the organism fails, all the data is lost, and can’t be built upon.
The idea that the data was in some way planted, or seeded is one way to account for this difficulty. It doesn’t help with the follow-on question of ‘By whom?’ or “Why?”. People came up with answers for these questions, and the answers were sufficiently satifactory to allow the development of civilisations that required an answer to the question, “Who says I have to do it that way?” and “Who made you the boss?” Religion and science are different, and we may develop a culture that has no need of religion, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. If, for example, we had “Thou shalt not kill” down right, it would be encouraging. We could start by not calling people who have a different take on things than us “nutters”.
In any case, it’s important to remember that evolution is a theory because we have not, and possibly never will be able to prove that it is true. It just is the best explanation so far. Some bit of information might pop up later on today that makes it necessary to scrap the whole thing.
Link | December 29th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Herbert L. Shallcross III wrote,
Read my comments quickly, since Nurse will soon “moderate” them out of existence.
I am an atheist. I expect reigion to eventually die out if the world becomes more rational and better educated.
That said, there is a rational case to be made for intelligent design. The reproduction of even the simplest single celled organism requires transmitting a great deal of information accurately. If this isn’t accomplished, the information dies with the organism and can’t be corrected or built upon. Studies of genomes show that techniques like redundancy and error checking are used, and are necessary. This implies that life cannot initially arise incrementally, but must leap to a certain level of sophistication immediately. This may not be impossible, but it affects the statistical landscape. Some theories, like creation by an intelligent being, or seeding by beings from some other place satisfy the question of how life occurred here, but leave open the question, “If it didn’t happen here, how did life begin?” As far as I know, we are not yet clever enough to create life, so these hypothetical gods or aliens would have to be at least one step ahead of us.
I’m just saying, I don’t know, nobody knows, and it’s way too early to disqualify any contenders. The greatest likelihood is that we won’t definitively know in our lifetimes. Don’t be so cocksure!
Link | January 9th, 2010 at 7:10 pm