Three engineers are arguing about
what background a Creator must have to have built a human body. "He
must have been a mechanical engineer," said one, "because, look at the
joints, the hydraulics of circulation!" A second nerd disagreed
vehemently: "Nonsense! He was a chemist! Look at the subtlety of nerve
transmission and of oxygenation of the blood!" The third, I think, was
closer to the truth, though: "He was a civil engineer. Who else would
put a sewer line through a recreational area?"
David Barash wipes the floor with "intelligent design" in the LA Times:
Current believers in creationism, masquerading in its
barely disguised incarnation, "intelligent design," argue similarly,
claiming that only a designer could generate such complex, perfect
wonders.
But, in fact, the living world is shot through with imperfection.
Unless one wants to attribute either incompetence or sheer malevolence
to such a designer, this imperfection — the manifold design flaws of
life — points incontrovertibly to a natural, rather than a divine,
process, one in which living things were not created de novo, but
evolved. Consider the human body. Ask yourself, if you were designing
the optimum exit for a fetus, would you engineer a route that passes
through the narrow confines of the pelvic bones? Add to this the tragic
reality that childbirth is not only painful in our species but
downright dangerous and sometimes lethal, owing to a baby's head being
too large for the mother's birth canal.
This design flaw is all the more dramatic because anyone glancing at
a skeleton can see immediately that there is plenty of room for even
the most stubbornly large-brained, misoriented fetus to be easily
delivered anywhere in that vast, non-bony region below the ribs. (In
fact, this is precisely the route obstetricians follow when performing
a caesarean section.)
Why would evolution neglect the simple, straightforward solution?
Because human beings are four-legged mammals by history. Our ancestors
carried their spines parallel to the ground; it was only with our
evolved upright posture that the pelvic girdle had to be rotated (and
thereby narrowed), making a tight fit out of what for other mammals is
nearly always an easy passage.
An engineer who designed such a system from scratch would be
summarily fired, but evolution didn't have the luxury of intelligent
design.
Admittedly, it could be argued that the dangers and discomforts of
childbirth were intelligently, albeit vengefully, planned, given
Genesis' account of God's judgment upon Eve: As punishment for Eve's
disobedience in Eden, "in pain you shall bring forth children." (Might
this imply that if she'd only behaved, women's vaginas would have been
where their bellybuttons currently reside?)
On to men. It is simply deplorable that the prostate gland is so
close to the urinary system that (the common) enlargement of the former
impinges awkwardly on the latter.
In addition, as human testicles descended — both in evolution and in
embryology — the vas deferens (which carries sperm) became looped
around the ureter (which carries urine from kidneys to bladder),
resulting in an altogether illogical arrangement that would never have
occurred if, like a minimally competent designer, natural selection
could have anticipated the situation.
There's much more that the supposed designer botched:
ill-constructed knee joints that wear out, a lower back that's prone to
pain, an inverted exit of the optic nerve via the retina, resulting in
a blind spot.
And what about the theological implications of all this? If God is
the designer, and we are created in his image, does that mean he has
back problems too?
In a letter to the editor, Ben Akerley asks (what should be) the obvious:
David P. Barash's scathing indictment of oxymoronic ID
(Intelligent Design) immediately brought to mind one of the favorite
stories that America's great agnostic orator, Robert Ingersoll
(1833-1899) used to tell his audiences: A devout clergyman one day
pointed out a crane to his young son explaining that God, in his
infinite wisdom, had designed his short legs and long, slender bill to
enable him to catch fish easily. Then the little boy protested
quizzically, "I understand God's goodness as far as the crane is
concerned, but father, don't you think the arrangement a little tough
on the fish?"
Of course ID also begs the unanswerable question that if creationism explains all origins, who designed the designer?
It concerns me a great deal that the issue of "first cause" is never
given a second thought. Who made me? cannot be answered, since it
immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?"
