November 5th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

As far as I can tell from read­ing the tes­ti­mony in the Dover trial, Intel­li­gent Design is the belief that the uni­verse was set in motion by God¹ bil­lions of years ago like a giant set of domi­noes, and that God used evo­lu­tion as part of his plan to create life on earth, but that God couldn’t set up the domi­noes prop­erly, so evo­lu­tion only worked some of the time. Evi­dently, God couldn’t think of how to get the process of evo­lu­tion to create cer­tain fea­tures like eye­balls or little tails for germs, so he had to magic them into existence.

Really.

People who believe in Intel­li­gent Design don’t think God was smart enough to do what he set out to do in cre­at­ing the earth with­out fudg­ing things along the way.

I was always shocked that pro­po­nents of Intel­li­gent Design were so bad at sci­ence, but now I’m even more shocked that they’re so bad at the­ol­ogy. Who wants to wor­ship a stupid God?

And more to the point, shouldn’t they call it Stupid Design?

Of course, this would explain a lot.

I mean, it would either take bil­lions of years of random muta­tions and nat­ural selec­tion or a stupid God to create some­thing like the human eye. Did you know that instead of nerves run­ning under­neath the retina along the back of the eye, we have nerves that run over the top so they have to go through the retina to get to the optic nerve? Really. It’s back­wards. And the result is that we all have a blind spot in each eye. Smart move, eh?

I’m just curi­ous, do you all run the wires for your home enter­tain­ment center in front of the TV or behind it? I find that it’s harder to see the screen when I drape wires all over it.

Or how about knees? What a lousy joint. Way too com­pli­cated, and it wears out so easily. Or the appen­dix? Why exactly do we need an organ that exists almost exclu­sively to kill us? And who was the genius that decided to co-​locate the major waste man­age­ment, repro­duc­tive and recre­ational cen­ters of the human body in the crotch? Does that seem san­i­tary to any­body²? I guess it’s a step up from a cloaca, but that’s not saying much.

And don’t get me started on being stuck on a planet in a solar system filled with aster­oids and comets. When’s the next meteor-​pocalypse, 2029? 2038? Nice one, oh wise creator.

So take your pick people: either keep your God out of the class­room, or tell me why you wor­ship some­body that you think is incompetent.

¹ Or some­body just like him. Could be aliens. Could be time trav­el­ers. But strangely, out­side of the pasta­far­i­ans, every sup­porter of Intel­li­gent Design thinks that it must be God. So let’s just stick with God.

² You could argue that the pres­ence of recre­ational sys­tems encour­ages good hygiene for the waste sys­tems, but from what I’ve seen in National Geo­graphic and the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, you’d be wrong.

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