Intelligent Design?

Those who deny (or can’t be bothered to understand) the Theory of Evolution, often grab the illusion of design found in nature as an argument in favor of a supernatural creator. The aerodynamic shape of a bird’s wing, the complexity of the human brain, the powerful eye of an eagle or the beauty of an orchid; all these things certainly seem to have been created by Intelligent Design. But as powerful as this illusion may be, it cannot be used as a valid point in arguing for a supreme architect. Why? Because those cherry picked examples don’t stand a chance when opposed to the rest of the Universe. The Universe as a whole will appear, to the unbiased observer, as nothing more than the constant expression of chaos or as the elegant manifestation of happenstance. The following are a few examples of the above:

Planet orbits are unstable, star formation is very inefficient (only 3% of gas clouds turn into stars) and the Milky Way Galaxy is on a head-on collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. Our solar system is nothing short of an interplanetary shooting gallery, with asteroids and comets randomly zooming around, threatening to pulverize its only inhabited planet. Our friends the dinosaurs are not here to testify how bad it can get, but our Russian brothers got a friendly reminder a few weeks ago. There is an astonishing excess of useless things floating around. Only in the Solar System, there are 7 empty major planets, plus Pluto and friends (empty), plus some randomly planted moons (you guessed it, also empty). Saturn has rings but no Saturnians to appreciate them. Zoom out to the interstellar level and it gets a lot weirder. The Universe is 95% nothingness. I’ll get to the concept of “nothing” in a future post, but for now, think that if you could hold all of the Universe in the palm of your hand, you wouldn’t be able to see anything but a few specs of dust. I do not see much design in all this nothingness.

Now back to Earth. Please consider a sample of the problems we face in the place we call home:

It took about 3.5-billion years of painful evolution to reach multi-cellular life on Earth but, as it turns out, 99% of all life that ever lived is now extinct thanks to disease, plagues, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and lightning strikes… Then, as a species, we are highly vulnerable to things like aggressive childhood leukemia, hemophilia, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, HIV/AIDS and cancer to name a few. Did the ultimate designer mean to undermine his own work, or does he do it just for fun? In order to cope with all these celestially designed hurdles, we are very badly equipped with a narrow view of the electromagnetic spectrum and a limited hearing of the frequency range. Our vision drastically declines with age, our teeth fall out, our lungs are highly inefficient and our warm-blooded system forces us to eat constantly and to spend a whole third of our life in a comatose state (sleeping). It seems like crocodiles may have closed a better deal with the guy upstairs; they can go for days without eating.

 

The shape and placement of the home we were assigned also deserves a little thought: we cannot live on two thirds of Earth’s surface since it’s covered with water, and we will freeze and/or starve to death on fifty percent of the remaining third (Antarctica, Sahara Desert, Mount Everest, Death Valley, etc.). This designer certainly isn’t much of a realtor. If our descendants make it that far into the future, they'll witness in about 5.4 billion years from today, how our Sun will have consumed its hydrogen core and grow to become a red giant. The effect of such a drastic change will inevitably reduce our planet to ashes. Unfortunately for us, there is a little glitch regarding the sustainability of our water heater…

Kindly keep in mind that besides the obvious attempts at humor, nothing of the above is based on speculation or revelation. It’s nothing but hard-core, cold, verifiable science. If you choose to disregard the obvious by believing that someone designed this Universe, you’ll have to admit the design was anything but intelligent. If you insist on believing that it was designed having YOU in mind, by all means, think again!