An Intelligent Design For Life

Let's get this straight from the off. I'm a man of science. Show me something that's true and actual, and everything will be satisfactual.

I'm not a man of faith. If you have faith, I'm happy for you. If you've found a God and a belief system that you can work with then kudos.

Just keep it to yourself will you? In particular, don't try to teach anyone that it's worth the same or more than science.

One of the big areas of frustration for me is the insistence that evolution isn't really how living things got to be like they are. Instead, everything was designed by God to be like this - the process known as "intelligent design". No matter what evidence you might be able to throw at the ID crowd (not to be confused with the IT Crowd, or the 1D Crowd) - little things like the fossil record for example - they're not having it.

So let's examine how their claims stack up against The Bible shall we? Exactly how intelligent was their creator's "Design For Life"?

I'll even be generous. I'll assume that the first person on earth (let's call him Adam for sake of argument).was designed in his entirety by God. Not a great job mind, given God put his reproductive bits in an enormously perilous and uncomfortable position, stuck his brain on the very top where stuff could fall on it and his heart behind a protective "cage" with huge gaps in the middle.

So anyway, there we have Adam. The Bible then tells us that Adam got a wife from God, made out of one of his ribs. Now thanks to the work of scientists, we know about DNA. If you take a rib out of someone and use it to make someone else, that someone else is going to have the DNA of the rib donor. So they are going to be effectively identical twins. God, in his ultimate wisdom, created identical twins and made them breed.

Again - intelligent? Those in charge of zoo breeding programmes for endangered species know that you have to keep genetically similar lines of breeding apart, otherwise you get all sorts of health issues. Look at Norfolk for example.

Not God though. Oh no. His intelligent design knew much better. So Adam and the new girl (let's call her Eve) have kids. Now the Bible gets fuzzy here on how many and of what gender. Only three are named, and they are all boys, so it throws in a disclaimer to say that there are "other sons and daughters" in the mix too. Here's the thing though. They've all got the same parents, and they are supposed to be the root of the rest of mankind.

So we're not just talking two people committing incest here, we're talking about a whole family at it. Brothers and sisters, for generation after generation, doing the nasty and giving birth to more inbred offspring each time. Again, as a man of science I would query the "intelligence" behind this sort of design. It's no wonder we're all 99 point whatever percent identical from a DNA perspective with that kind of background.

That's just the physical stuff. I haven't even touched on the fact we're wired to be competitive, malevolent, selfish scrotebags with a short temper and the capacity to build weapons of infinite capacity to deliver death and suffering. Way to go, big guy!

So that's people sorted. All in all, not a great report card so far for God. Must do better next time, see me. Although preferably not via a piece of toast, or a teatowel, or whatever way you keep manifesting yourself.

So what about the environment he gave people to work with. The playground where we, and all the other species he found time to create, including the stuff that will kill us given half the chance, are meant to thrive and prosper.

Well for a start, two-thirds of it is covered in the wet stuff. Most of the things that live in the wet stuff can't survive on the dry stuff, and most of the things that live on the dry stuff can't survive in the wet stuff. Not great planning that.

The bits at the top and bottom are so cold to be completely inhospitable to anything above a microbial level. There are bits around the middle which are so hot and dry that they support the odd few reptiles, insects and other stuff that doesn't need much of the wet stuff - did I mention that, the things that can't live in the wet stuff still need it to survive, only some of the wet stuff will kill them if they drink it while the other won't.

So assuming God made us all in his own image - and that must have been the plan all along - why did he bother building a planet where we can only actually live on twenty percent of its surface area? Hardly an efficient use of time and resources, all that wasted carbon. Why make the moon and the stars and all the other guff in the universe that's so far away we'll never actually get to go there? Showing off? Why not put some of that hydrogen and helium to good use closer to home?

So that's the physical and mental aspects of people, and the planet on which we live, all designed by a supposedly hyper-intelligent supreme being. Frankly, if we ever have to start over we may as well just give the job to Kevin McLeod and let him get on with it. See if "Grand Intelligent Designs" makes a better job, it can hardly do any worse.