INTELLIGENT DESIGN: a sort of book report.

     Over the Christmas holidays a friend of mine gave me a book. In a time when one of our two political parties would rather burn books it is important to acknowledge the importance of passing on knowledge by people smarter than us, namely writers with the necessary knowledge to inform us within their area of expertise. The name of the book is, Signature In The Cell,  and it deals with intelligent design, a concept of which I am suspicious. The author, Stephen C. Meyer is a PhD in the philosophy of science and is director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. A quick Google tells me that the Discovery Institute's raison d'etre is to spread the concept of intelligent design, which would mean to my understanding, they have moved on from discovery and wish to promote it, as if it has not been promoted already. I am not merely suspicious of intelligent design, i dont see how it can make sense.  I should also reveal that I have no scientific training, let alone degrees, but I am occasionally capable of probing important concepts. I ask those awkward questions: why do paintings of Adam and Eve have belly-buttons, for instance? Why does Adam not have a scar where his rib would have been? If Adam and Eve were the first humans by God's design, where did the women Caine and Able married come from? How is it a boy, born of parents from Galilee in the first century CE, has such a white complexian? These questions and others are as unfathomable as Quantum Theory. The only thing i know about quantum theory is that Irwin Schroedinger knows nothing about cats, boxed or otherwise. Some would call me a smart-ass. I would think it's better to be a smart-ass than an ass, though some of my Facebook responders would accuse me of being just that. Intelligent Design means different things to different Christians. Some have conflated ID with creationism as a way to teach Genesis in science classes. Getting the Tyranasaurus nose under the tent, so to speak. This author does not fall into that classification and I credit him for that. According to him the genetic code is the creation of an intelligent designer in the same way that binary code is the creation of an intelligent designer, which prompts me to stop reading and try to analyze that idea. Actually I need no excuses to pause my reading. This is not what you could describe as a page-turner. It makes me wish for a Clive Cussler novel where the protagonist destroys a classic car, motorcycle, boat, or airplane before the penultimate ending. Still the question enters my skeptical mind, "is there any complex intellectual development that has been accomplished by one designer. Genetic mapping is a recent scientific discovery, accomplished near the end of the 1990s. We don't know for a fact that those varied combinations of bases making up DNA were designed or if they came together over hundreds of millions of years (or 6000, if you follow Genesis).  The author would have us believe that they were laboriously assembled by a single magic-man in the vast and lonely regions of space. And even more exciting, the various combinations of the base materials, A,T,G,C, that make up the DNA of all life, not just us, would have been intentionally ordered, rather than evolving in some primordial soup.  Binary code goes back to the dawn of the 18th century, the contribution by a fellow named Gottfried Leibnitz. I can not say for sure if he had collaborators, but the binary that he theorized  was probably not created by him alone, but worked out by a group of very smart people. Perhaps some on that team of intelligent people disagreed with others on the team. These and other questions can be asked by others, smarter than I. My supposition is that there are several intelligent designers responsible for any complex design. Their product is teased out over years, decades, even centuries, in the same manner that some European churches took hundreds of years to complete. This supposition, I do not dare call it a hypothesis, would be more compatible with the pantheon of God's in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and other ancient cultures, than in the single God of the Judeo-christian world. 

     DNA and Binary are code. A code is a way of communicating to another intelligent being while not allowing other intelligent beings to poke their noses in. A reader of spy fiction would get the idea that code can be cracked and, thus needs to be constantly updated, and thus requires a secret bureau of coders and a secret bureau of code breakers. Pretty soon you have so many people working codes you need an agency to manage the coders and an agency to investigate the coders. The Mad Magazine comic Spy versus Spy comes to mind. 

     A belief in a diety is how we explain that which we can't explain. It is not based on examination and experimentation. It requires only a mind so eager to believe that they set aside their skepticism. Science requires skepticism, to weaken or strengthen the scientific argument. Over time we start seeing things that seem to work out, and things that don't. Some Christians  believe in the young earth theory, as outlined in Genisis, some 6000 or 7000 years. Others are willing to accept the paleontolgical, archeological, and geographic evidence that is the basis of our understanding of the world we are a part of, yet still retain their belief that a man in the clouds was responsible. Science tells us that lead is the end-product of the breakdown of Uranium 238. The half-life of U 238 is some 4.5 billion years. Uranium 235  by contrast is a mere 704 million years. These and other elements in the soil around a fossil gives us a way to date the contents of that dig. Can I proclaim this to be true? Of course not. I would need to be a MAGAt to have that much confidence in my beliefs. But science has ways to examine and test its claims. Religion has only belief. I'm comfortable knowing at least that.  In the story of Methuselah the Bible tells us he lived to the ripe old age of 969 years. Imagine how swollen his prostrate would be after nearly a thousand years. I knew a woman once that died at 106 years of age. In her young years she was fascinated by the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk. Later she was able to watch man's first efforts in space, culminating in six flights to the moon with man's footprints left behind. Toward the end of her life she saw two space shuttle explosions. There was a framed, autographed portrait of NASA  astronauts that her granddaughter had secured for her, on her casket. Everyone knew her as Granny and her cookies were legendary in Lincoln City. Granny lived to an age few of us in this age of medical miracles ever attain. And yet Methuselah lived over eight centuries longer. There is no supporting data of Methuselah's existence, save for a very large bottle of wine named after him, and of course, the Old Testament. 

     The sequence of Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, coded into the DNA is now known and is being used to advance medicine even farther. Yet, while we have now mapped DNA, we do not know how those elements in their varying order came into existence. Was there a master plan, or just a hunch? Does the divine being ever have hunches?  If you've ever assembled furniture from IKEA, you might have an insight into how difficult assembling those four ingredients into a living thing can be. Imagine the level of difficulty when you create a thing with only combinations of A,G,T,C, or one's and zeroes.

     Science gives us enough evidence that a hypothesis can be formed. It gives us enough data to apply blind tests to that hypothesis, enough to form a theory. That theory is as close to truth, if it stands, as science will allow. It will stand until it is disproven. Religion tells us something is because God wills it, created it. In the case of Methuselah the claim is unbelievably fantastic. A level of fantasy not seen until George Santos appeared in the House of Representatives. And yet that is enough for many people, maybe even most. No test is needed if your belief is strong. Many people who believe that we, and everything around us were created by an intelligent being, are unmoved by George Santos claims to intelligence. He is by no means the only such member of that legislative party that is not held to the truth. Yet they are supremely confident of their closeness with God. As Mark Twain once described it, "as confident as a preacher with a full house".

    7n