The Hitchhiker's Guide to Intelligent Design
Earlier this week, President Bush expressed his support for the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside the theory of evolution in American schools. By backing the quackery that is this repackaged creationism, Bush is showing both his usual disdain for the scientific method and his preference for faith over fact as the basis for public policy. This time, though, the President is also highlighting his ignorance of basic philosophy and pop culture.
For those who had the good fortune to miss the abominable intelligent design versus evolution debate in places like Kansas, here are a few background points. Advocates of intelligent design argue that evolution cannot explain every aspect of the creation of life. In particular, they claim that some life systems and functions at the microbiological level are "irreducibly complex." That is, they are so specific and necessary in function, so central to the existence of an organism, that they could not have come about by chance or evolved over time. As a result, only the existence of an "intelligent designer" can explain their presence.
To overcome past opposition to creationism in the public schools, ID proponents disingenuously claimed that the "intelligent designer" need not necessarily be the Biblical God of creation. Over the last decade, a myriad of pseudo-scientific groups, such as the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA), have emerged to put a scientific facade on the ID claims.
Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush has been a consistent backer of creationism and its 21st century incarnation going to back to his days as Texas governor. On August 1st, 2005, he restated his belief in the theoretical equivalence of evolution and intelligent design, proclaiming that "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both concluded otherwise and expressed the consensus of the scientific community that ID should have no place in American public science instruction:
"The claim that equity demands balanced treatment of evolutionary theory and special creation in science classrooms reflects a misunderstanding of what science is and how it is conducted. Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."
While Bush most assuredly didn't read that 1999 report, he also no doubt was a no-show for his freshman Philosophy 101 course at Yale. There, he would have been introduced to one of the earliest and most devastating broadsides against the "design" argument, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
In the Dialogues, Hume dispatches the teleological argument for the existence of God. In it, the argument is advanced that in the same way that we infer that a watch has a watchmaker, we can induce that the world has a designer. Hume rejects this on multiple grounds. First, he cites the "first cause" problem, saying in essence, "who designed the designer?" But beyond this classic chicken and egg problem are other objections. Hume the skeptic would claim that we have no grounds for our induction that the existence of a complex entity necessarily implies the existence of its creator. Just as important to Hume, the design argument is an anthropomorphic one which ascribes human qualities and processes to creation. Again, for Hume, there are no grounds for that assumption.
Bush, of course, can be excused for his ignorance of Hume, given that his familiarity with things Scotch ends with Johnny Walker. Instead, Bush and intelligent design proponents should just see (or better yet, read) Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the Hitchhiker's Guide, Adams offers an absurd proof of the non-existence of God every bit as compelling - and baseless - as intelligent design.
It all centers around the Babel Fish, a recurring element in the Hitchhiker's intergalactic trilogy. When inserted in the ear, the Babel Fish enabled the listener to comprehend any spoken language. Its unique design? The fish feeds on mental energy created while composing a sentence, and apparently 'excretes' mental energy in a form that can be understood by others. Adams then cited the incredible usefulness of the Babel Fish as a universal translator as definitive proof of the non-existence of God:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn’t thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, "Well That about Wraps It Up for God."
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
All of which brings us back to President Bush and the advocates of intelligent design. The parallels between the Adams' Babel Fish and ID theory are striking - and eery. The difference, of course, is that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was meant to be a joke. Unfortunately, with intelligent design, the joke's on us.
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