Intelligent Design

Let me start this one off by stating that I do believe in God, and I believe that the Bible is His word, which should be taken literally when written literally such as in the book of Genesis, and metaphorically/poetically when written in a that style such as in the book of Psalms or Daniel. That said, this little ad for a dvd arguing intelligent design annoyed me.

In the ad it starts out by telling how because a big asteroid slammed into Jupiter, our planet is shielded from all asteroids and therefore we should all believe in the intelligent design theory. Never mind that this would mean also assuming that God specifically built the dangers too. That kind of intelligence would be like the stalker who burns down a woman's house just so that he can save her. Besides that point, I admit that the point may be better addressed in the film, but when you consider all of the possible angles that a meteor might strike the earth from and that it might be orbiting the sun on a completely different plane, and consider the vast distances between the planets, and the fact that they orbit at different rates meaning that the earth at a given moment be on the opposite side of the sun from any of the gas giants, the notion that the serve as major protectors seems a little silly. I have no doubt that a great deal more asteroids to strike them, they have much larger gravitational planes.

The ad then goes on to hint at all of the other stuff you hear for I.D.ers about how if the planet were any closer to the sun we would all burn, and any farther we would all freeze, and how if the moon were in any different position, or had less craters, or rotated any differently the planet would be uninhabitable. The ironic thing is that many of the people who buy into this stuff can call out the same abuses of logic when practiced by atheists in defense of evolution, or by environmental nut jobs defending cherished dreams of global warming.

To say that you know what would happen in the case of any of these hypotheticals where the moon is different or the earth's orbit was different or whatever is absurd. It's every bit as bad as the atheists and the environmental nut jobs who make their pathetic cases. The truth is our environment is far too complex for these types of statements to be made accurately.