Intelligent Design? Only if you are terminally stupid...

Please! I have one question for the Intelligent Design folks, and that question is "Why would God bother to do all this shit?" There is a new effort to make sense of the Evolution vs Intelligent Design non-controversy in a film titled Flock of Dodos. The afore referenced site has a trailer for the film (which appears to be playing almost exclusively on college campuses), and there is one line in the trailer which truly bothers me. That line is, "Today, less than half of Americans believe in evolution." Can we say "dumbing of America?"

With more than half the population not believing the geologic record...stuff actually set in stone, mind you...it becomes obvious why we have an idiot in the White House and a foreign policy that is virtually guaranteed to paint a bulls-eye on this country for the foreseeable future. Of course, I do have to agree with anybody who says we didn't descend from apes, because, in fact, we didn't. Apes are not our forebearers, they are our cousins. Apes and humans descended from a common primate ancestor, which was more like a lemur than a great ape. But that is a quibble which distracts from the primary focus here.

I went to college a long time ago, and, in college, my major field of study was anthropology. It was absolutely clear way back then that evolution was about as proven a theory as it could get without the invention of time travel. The problem with the geologic record is that it is like a drunken photographer who snaps pictures at random: sometimes something of import is captured, but most of the time there is nothing on the film but random "noise". Therefore, anytime somebody tells me the "geologic record is inconclusive" I have to believe that said person is so insecure in his view of self and species that he has to try to separate himself from, basically, this universe.

Evolution and Creationism (let's stop this drivel about "Intelligent Design" and call it what it really is...) should not be mentioned in the same sentence because they are two entirely different things. Evolution is a science based on the study of both living organisms and the geologic record. It is the theory which tries to make sense of observable facts, and, as far as I'm concerned, it does a pretty damn good job. Creationism is theology, pure and simple. It is not science because it depends entirely on faith. And that's what really gets me. The Creationists bitch and moan about how the geologic record is incomplete, yet they don't blink an eye when one asks for incontrovertible proof that a God exists. Oops! They can't do it, but that doesn't faze them. And that, in my opinion, fatally flaws their position. Not that they can't prove God's existence, but that their inability to do so does not cause them to pause in their attack upon science.

The final straw is that there is no real reason for there to be any conflict between evolution and the belief in a deity. First of all, the Fundamentalist Christians out there need to understand that God is not a human being; He was before the universe (which He created) came into existence. Heaven is not located somewhere in the starry fundament. If it exists (and I mostly believe that it does), it exists in another plane/dimension. So, understanding that God exists in a different plane than this particular universe, we can hypothesize that, perhaps, a "day" for God is not the same as a "day" for us. And when the Bible says that God "created man in his image", it is talking about our souls, not our physical appearance. Because, oops, God is not a physical being: He is a spiritual being--which brings us back to that other plane of existence idea. And, when the Bible talks about what He created, what it is talking about is the physical laws which govern this universe. The evolution of life on this particular planet actually has followed a pretty specific set of rules (call them laws if you want) which, I think, is pretty much what God intended.

So, let's take the stickers--the ones which say that evolution is an unproved theory and that Intelligent Design offers a alternative theory) out of the science books. All those people who have to prove their superiority over something because they are actually terrified that they may actually be just another part of nature, need to find a therapist to help them with their problem, and we need to put this whole non-debate behind us and move on.