ID, Sex Combs, and Theodicy

Harry Eagar, staff columnist at The Maui News, recently wrote this column (quoted in full here with the author's permission), which has a curious hook at the end.

In 49 other states, many eyes are turned to Dover, Pa., where the school board wants to teach the kiddies intelligent design.

This is hardly an issue in Hawaii. I blame the Buddhists for depriving us of this sport.

I am not a Buddhist, but my understanding is that they are pretty relaxed about how we got here, possibly because they believe we are coming back again.

Whatever the merits of that, the presence of about 15 percent highly respectable Buddhists has done wonders for the manners of the Fundamentalists in Hawaii. Down South, where I grew up, the preachers could -- and did -- preach that anybody who didn't subscribe to the views summarized in the Schofield Reference Bible was an agent of Satan.

Since there was no identifiable body of well-behaved non-Fundamentalists willing to challenge the preachers, they were able to bully everybody else on evolution and other subjects, like beer. The Buddhists don't have to say a word to abash our local Fundamentalists, though. Their presence is enough.

I was in Houston the week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, where I amused myself by watching televangelists preach that God was sending a message and a chastisement to the notorious sinners of New Orleans. Skeptics (none seen in Houston but I found some on the Internet) noted that Bourbon Street was not flooded, while dozen of churches were. Go figure.

I was never exposed to the evidence for evolution through natural selection in school. Roman Catholics in those days were nearly as relaxed about evolution as Buddhists. At St. Pius X High School the biology teacher was also, and primarily, the assistant football coach. Each day, he would come into the classroom, sit on the edge of his desk and tell us, "Take out yer books and I will give youse some biology notes."

He wasn't a native Southerner.

He then read from the textbook, leaving out all the a's, an's and the's, and we were supposed to copy it out. We didn't get very far into the book before the year ended.

I don't know what the girls were taught. We were separated in biology class.

So, deprived of the fine public school education that I might have had, I've had to teach myself biology.

Recently I learned that we humans have a gene called SCML.

What it does for us, if anything, is not yet discovered, but it turned up along with the 30,000 or so other genes in the Human Genome Project. This particular gene was already known, and had a name, because it had been discovered in fruit flies.

It is often said that we share 99 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, or 45 percent with bananas.

I don't know what the antievolutionists make of this sort of statistic. They seem to just ignore it. I have read the principal papers of the leading Intelligent Design Creationists, like Alvin Plantinga, Michael Behe, Philip Johnson and William Dembski, and they do not have anything to say about it.

They should, because the fact that living things share so many genes seems to require some explanation.

Take those little plastic necklaces that you perhaps bought for the keiki at the county fair. The power that makes them glow is adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is coded for by the ATP gene.

You could say that we share the ATP gene with bananas (and every other form of life) because ATP is the only practical way to transfer energy inside a cell. (That wouldn't be precisely correct, but it's the best molecule for it, and every cell uses it.)

The fact that you and your peanut butter and jelly sandwich both have (or had) ATP genes does not in itself prove that you and peanuts shared a common ancestor that had the ATP gene and passed it down both ways. It suggests that, but it does not prove it.

SCML, though, does more than suggest.

We got it in one of two conceivable ways: Either a common ancestor of us and flies provided it to both, or a designer gave it to humans and to flies independently.

The second alternative is possible, I suppose, but it does raise the question of why a designer, intelligent or otherwise, would give you a gene that carries instructions to make a sex comb on your midleg.

Because that's what SCML does for fruit flies.

There are a few noteworthy things here.

First, the humor element. One technique for eliciting a laugh, with the possible additional payoff of putting a hook in your memory, is misdirection: effective and easy to describe, yet difficult to put into practice. Here Mr. Eagar tosses SCML onto the table early on, then draws the reader elswhere in a path that ultimately leads us right back to SCML and the punchline. No, it isn't an earth shaking thing, I just happen to enjoy analyzing effective writing, deftly done.

Second, Mr. Eagar's hook, and flooded churches in New Orleans, lead the reader to think about what ID, in its entirety, entails. When ID provides credit to some yet to be named designer for Nature's complex wonders, all the way down to bacterial swim-fins, that Anonymous Designer similarly deserves credit for everything where the God-of-the-Gaps argument resides.

Can you spell Theodicy? (No fair looking.)

Theodicy is a branch of theology that seeks to reconcile the existence of evil with a benevolent God. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and last year's tsunami, as well as human nature in general, have each served to raise this apparent conundrum. I say apparent, because there is far less conundrum here than meets the eye.

Natural disasters don't qualify as evil, because they are part and parcel of a world operating without continuous Godly intervention: an earth without earthquakes is an earth without vulcanism, which is a dead earth. Looked at in this way natural disasters are a feature, not a bug; they have no moral component. (Credit here goes to David Cohen, in some -- typical for him -- particularly insightful posts at BrosJudd immediately following the tsunami.)

Human nature presents its own conundrum, but also one that is more apparent than real. If humans are to be other than automatons, they require free will, which, by definition means the capacity for evil.

Again, but through a different path, feature, not bug.

ID, a Two Letter Acronym for Irony

Intelligent Design, in crediting a deus ex machina for natural history's unexplained features means that deus, the Designer, gets credit for all of them.

In addition to bacterial swim fins and hemoglobin, the Designer also gets credit for:

The pelvis, which slopes sharply forward, and lower back, both designed for knuckle walking. The only reason we are able to walk upright is the sharp bend at the base of our spines, making the lower back a notoriously weak part of our anatomy.

Teeth. The human muzzle is flatter than other mammals, with a corresponding reduction in space for teeth, particularly the ironically named wisdom teeth.

Sinuses. We have the same bones in our faces as other mammals, just shaped differently. But the drainage system, which came along for the ride, is a dog's breakfast.

Prostate gland. This has design failure stamped all over it.

Giving credit to some Designer for otherwise unexplained features of life means giving that designer credit for all such features, including ones that would shame any first year engineering student. The list above, far shorter than it could be, contains (at least before modern medicine) the cause of early death and agony simultaneously widespread, prolonged, and random.

None of them are essential to life or humanity. None of them are the result of "intelligence." Thre is no more intelligence in this list than the likelihood someone will ever get a Nobel for inventing the artificial appendix.

This is where ID collides with theodicy, taking it, and irony, to a whole new level.

Thanks to ID, the question "Why does God allow evil?" has now morphed into "Why is God evil/incompetent/ignorant?"

The question, the inevitable consequence of taking ID at its word, is fair, obvious, and resistant to any answer consistent with Christian notions of God. ID, in attacking naturalistic evolution as destructive of faith in God, has replaced it with an idea far more destructive of faith in general, and Christianity in particular, than evolution could ever be.

It is a doddle to encompass naturalistic evolution within Christian theology; Catholicism has done so without so much as a ripple. In contrast, making God responsible for every jot of natural history makes Him responsible for all the tittles as well.

If there has ever been a case of being careful what one asks for, ID certainly presents it.