A Little Fishy

Strand #1: I first heard about the concept of 'Intelligent Design' from Darren Barefoot's post referring to this interesting article about it in Wired.

More recently, Pogge has posted on the topic and the New York Times had an article on it today (reg. req'd).

Personally, I find it hard to take the whole Intelligent Design concept seriously. In a nutshell, the argument is that the world is so complex that somebody (intelligent) must have designed it. e.g. If you were walking on a beach and found a watch, the purposeful nature of it's design would leave you to believe that it must have had an intelligent creator and not just occurred by chance. And like a watch has a watchmaker a body must have a bodymaker.

Now I'm not saying that the universe wasn't created by some intelligent being. I'm guessing that anyone with the power to create a universe would have the power to lead us to believe whatever they wanted, leaving the question moot.

But the fact that the universe is complicated (by our standards) doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Arguing that human's are so special that we had to have been made specially, just sounds way too much like arguments that the sun goes round the earth, that the earth is the centre of the universe, that humans have a soul or a 'free will' that other animals don't and all the other human-centred nonsense we like to make up to make ourselves feel special.

Especially when simple observation shows us how similar we are to the next most intelligent animals on the planet and when evolution clearly lays out how beings of greater complexity can arise out of simpler ones without the need for intelligent external intervention.

Strand #2: As long-time readers will know, after making the ill-advised decision to fly with Jetsgo, my flight home for Christmas was delayed by 28 hours. On the plus side, all my time waiting around at the airport allowed me to catch up on my reading. Specifically, I was able to read two books I had been meaning to get to for a long time: Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind (readable but not great - The Amazon editorial review is pretty accurate in my opinion) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams which was great fun, although I think it was wise to leave it as a fairly short book.

The Rope¹: Since I had read the Wired article on Intelligent Design, I was amused to come across the following passage in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (written in the 70's), which is written in reference to the Babel fish, a small fish you can put in your ear which will translate any language for you,

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "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 vanishes 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 at the next zebra crossing."

That pretty much sums it up.

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¹ Technically, according to Wikipedia, a rope is made from three strands, whereas my story only has two. But does this really bother me? I'm afraid not.