Rants & Raves

From Red Dwarf, a low budget BBC sci-fi show from the late 80′s-early 90′s:

Lister: What do you believe in, then? Do you believe in God?
Rimmer: God? Certainly not! What a preposterous thought! I believe in aliens, Lister.
Lister: Oh, right, fine, something sensible at last.
Rimmer: Aliens, Lister, with technology so far in advance of our own we can’t even begin to imagine.

I thought of this when I was listening to the inane drivelling of the proponents of ID, or Intelligent Design, on NPR this morning. My friend Michael explains all the stupidity with the arguments for ID very well (check out the whole blog, although the arguments et al are January 19th and before.) Google “intelligent design” and come up with millions of pages at least mentioning it. However, I will briefly outline the basics of the argument here. ID believers are pretty much, if not exactly, the same people who pushed for the teaching of creationism in schools some years ago. Because teaching about God in public schools is unconstitutional, the push moved to the belief that all life was started by an inteligent designer. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, and we should teach another version of how life started (forgetting the fact that evolution is how life came to be what it is today, not how it started, but I digress.)

Now the main thing wrong here is that ID is a very thinly veiled attept to teach religion in public schools, where many, if not most, of the students are not Christian. (Here’s a secret, don’t tell anyone! That’s why teaching creationism is considered unconstitutional!)

As I was listening to a scientist who believes in God talk about how ID isn’t a good idea (the fact that ID hasn’t been tested while evolution has, etc.) a thought occured to me that if the designer isn’t God, who, or what, could it be? Duh, aliens!

If God was the designer, why would He have made the body to be so susceptible to cancerous growths? diabetes? asthma? the common cold? Was it to keep us in check? And yes, these things happen to good people, not just those of us who live in sin. But if aliens made us, then I could understand that the aliens would be fallible and we could have been one of the steps on the way to a perfect society.

Before I get angry comments from religious people, let me say this – I do believe in God, or at least some higher force watching over me. I believe in the afterlife, and, maybe contradictorily, I believe in reincarnation (I HAD to be a cat in ancient Egypt-the evidence is just too great to be otherwise.) It was touch and go for a while as I was doing some soul-searching, but after some years of figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and how I fit into the big scheme of things, I realized that if I don’t have some higher power in my life, then what I’m doing doesn’t seem as meaningful. Do your own soul-searching and you’ll come up with your own conclusion.

I just don’t believe that, with all the evidence stacking up, that there’s a better answer for how life started and evolved than what we know today through science. One of the arguments is that there are too many gaps in the theory of evolution. Scientists are the first to admit that there are gaps, but consider this – we know a whole lot more about how we came to be now than we knew 20 years ago. 20 years from now more of those gaps will be filled. Maybe some part of the evolutionary puzzle will have to change when more evidence comes into play. It happens every year. Just this year there was a story about how the indigenous people here might have come from Australia, thereby changing our evolutionary viewpoint. That’s why it’s a theory – it’s based on very good evidence, but it is open to change.

So I put in my vote for aliens as our intelligent designer, since we can’t teach about God in public schools. Now, can we start discussing more important things, like whether SpongeBob SquarePants is gay? (He’s not gay, he’s just “special”.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at 8:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.