The New Intelligent Design

Intelligent design used to be the name of a proof of the existence of God. If you look at a house, you can see it was designed by someone at least marginally competent. It didn't just fall together. The parts of a house function as a unit. By extension if you look at the world, the parts function together, so it also must have been designed by someone intelligent, in this case by God.

This argument begs questions. Who, then, designed God? And why do you think the world is well designed? As a friend of mine said recently, the world is a hard place to live in, and it's even harder if you're dumb. 

Today many people believe that the world was not produced by design but by physics and natural selection, which piled one thing on another. The world is jerry-built, according to science. 

Recently Tom Belton loaned me a review of SAPIENS by Yuval Harari. Harari states that there is no evidence that humans have grown smarter over time. I think what he means is that humans were shaped by natural selection, but for the last 5,000 years we have not evolved into a smarter mammal. This explains, perhaps, why our poets are not better than Homer. Obama is not kinder or more empathic than St. Francis. It explains why masses of people live in misery and 1% eat from silver bowls. Today, Harari writes, we are leaving natural selection behind and redesigning things to suit ourselves. Today intelligent design is in the hands of scientists, and scientists are closely related to Neanderthals. 

The situation has created a backlash. I'm a progressive and live among progressive college graduates who believe that GMO food makes you sick, that vaccinations harm children, that fluoridated water destroys your mind and so on. For no good reason they fear the things we design. And why not fear nuclear weapons and combustion engines? Keep in mind that human intelligent design has doubled our average lifespan. I am 80 and still have my fluoridated teeth. Maybe that's why I remain an optimist.