Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Sneaking God In The Back Door



Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design
Intelligent design is a way of getting people to teach about creationisum without teaching it, Intelligent design is creationisum without the god. Designed in such away as that once children hear about it. Their first thought is to think that god is the one incharge of this so called intelligent design.

It also has the advantage of doing away with all those pesky errors in the bible about the order of creation. You know how god made the earth and all things on it, then made the sun.

But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Darwin ofcurse deals with all of these things, unlike intelligent design which really has no answers what so ever and is so broad in its scope that it could answer any question put to it.

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