Empirical Theology of Intelligent Design

Everyone by now who pays any attention to the news at all, even as a temporary distraction from the more important issues being discussed in US Magazine is aware of the whole debate over Intelligent Design, wherein the Scientific Creationists, having been slaughtered in the courts try to slay the theory of evolution by citing the central insight of William Paley's teleological proof for the existence of God. Just in case you aren't aware of it though, the proof, in a nutshell is to look at all this stuff that we've got, think about it having all come about by happenstance and shout "No f***-ing way!" I don't know if there's a latin term for "Argument via appeal to common sense", but that's it in a nutshell. It's a really good "gut feel" argument that God exists. (Of course, common sense tells us the world is flat and the sun revolves around the Earth, too.) By pretending to be a scientific theory yet failing to do what all scientific theories must do, namely to make predictions, Intelligent Design has no credibility with people honestly employing their reason. ID still has many followers, however, because faith and reason often are in opposition to each other. Among Evangelicals, fideism is the great censor: anything may be true so long as it doesn't appear to violate the principles of faith; therefore Evangelicals hold superconductivity to be scientific fact, but evolution as corrupt heathen bupkis inspired by the devil.

Arguing about the nature of science is fruitless with people whose answer to everything is either "God loves us and wants it that way", or, if the issue is thorny, "God put that there to test our faith" (as satirized by Bill Hicks's famous dinosaur monologue). Instead, the only real way to address the shortcomings of Intelligent Design is to hold a mirror up to it from a theological perspective and say "do you really believe this"?

The following information isn't original. Heck, most of the text is cut & paste, and can be found on The eXile, a web-zine I can only recommend to those truly keen on seeing just what a fetid philosophy nihilism is. But, the nihilists at The eXile have come up with something worthwhile: the Schopenhauer Awards. Like the Darwin Awards, they're exemplars of theory in action, only, in this case, it's Schopenhauer's theory that the only purpose to the universe is suffering and misery. As a Buddhist, I don't agree with that, as I don't think there's any purpose to anything (nor any need for purpose), but I noticed that in addition to making the case for God being a sadist, they also realized that Intelligent Design only looks good when you look at kittens, lemurs and other cuddly things. If you expand your perspective, you find things in the world that one can easily believe evolved, but which challenge the idea that someone designed them.

If you have a weak stomach, or don't like to see the kinds of things that nightmares are made of, just take my word for it and stop reading now -- you'll be happy you did.

The Evidence:

Ascaris Lumbricoides, the Roundworm

The Roundworm devotes all its energy to the production of more Roundworms. The female can lay up to 200,000 eggs every day. The eggs are laid in the small intestines of a human being or a pig--because the Roundworm, like the eXile, sees no real difference between people and swine. The Roundworm is not only the most common of human parasites, but one of the biggest. A full-grown female, the kind who pops out all those eggs every day, can be up to 18 inches long. A big worm can easily clog your intestines, bursting them and killing you. The Roundworm seems to go out of its way to make infestation even more painful and horrifying for its human host. It doesn't just squirm down to your guts and start popping out babies. No, it goes through a grotesque, horrifying and apparently useless trip up through your body, only to end up back where it started. You eat a few thousand worm-eggs, and they hatch in your small intestine. So far, so good, so to speak. But then the "juvenile" worm chews its way out of your guts, into your lungs. The lungs react to these thousands of parasites by swelling up and producing more mucous to try to expel the foreign bodies. This leads to a special form of pneumonia, ascaris pneumonia, which can kill you. But in most cases you simply develop a bad cough which will last as long as you live. And instead of coughing up the worms, you'll cough them into the pharynx and then re-swallow them. That's exactly what the worm-larvae want, because the worm can only grow to adulthood where it started, down in the small intestine. Biologists admit they're puzzled by this "migration." It seems to challenge the idea that evolution moves toward efficiency. The Roundworm is a persistent traveler, and may just decide to migrate on its own. The worm doesn't like anesthetics, for example, and when a human who's carrying a gutload of Roundworms is given anesthesia for an operation, the worms he or she is hosting often decide to leave the toxic neighborhood. They wriggle up from the small intestine, through the digestive tract, and slither out the patient's nose and mouth just as he or she is lying on the recovery table, thinking that the worst is over.

The Candiru

It's just a little freshwater fish, the Candiru, only an inch or two long. It's classified as a "parasitic catfish," but it doesn't have much in common with Mark Twain's good-eatin' Mississippi catfish. If there had been Candiru in the Mississippi, Huck and Jim would've spent the whole trip downriver huddled together in the middle of the raft, screaming like Chef in Apocalypse Now, "Never get off the boat!" Luckily for Huck, the Candiru only haunts the rivers and streams of the Amazon Basin. The Amazon may be romanticized in every PBS nature show, but it actually deserves its old name: "the Green Hell." And of all the nightmare critters infesting that Hell, the most horrific is our own little Candiru. The Candiru is the only vertebrate parasite on Earth to target humans. Think about that. We're good at picking parasites off ourselves and each other. It's a primate specialty. How would any parasite big enough for us to spot and grab manage to avoid our nimble ape fingers? It would have to wriggle into a place we couldn't reach. The Candiru, you see, has a nose for urine. When it gets hungry, it sniffs the current of its stream or river for a urine trail, then follows the trail upstream to the source: someone pissing into the water. The Candiru wriggles up the victim's anus, then gnaws its way into the urinary tract. The pain is reportedly agonizing. And once the Candiru is in place, it's impossible to dislodge, thanks to several sharp, back-pointing spines which pop up when the critter has reached its destination. Men who have been Candiru-ized have an option, at least: cutting off their penis. The pain and horror of infestation is so great that victims not only accept but beg for this radical therapy. Women aren't so lucky. They have no way at all to get rid of the spiked hook inside them.

Synanceia horrida, The Estuary Stonefish

This bottom-dweller is a perfect poster-child for Schopenhauer's claim that life is nothing but ugliness and pain. As evil as it looks, this critter is much creepier once you know what it can do. You see, the Estuarine Stonefish is basically a big, ugly hypodermic needle filled with poison. It can hardly move. It doesn't need to. It just settles into the muddy bottom of shallow bays and estuaries, perfectly camouflaged as a lump of mud and algae, and waits to envenom an unlucky fisherman or wading child. Every year, thousands of people step on this little booby-trap. Within seconds, they're screaming in agony, because this sluggish, slow-swimming lump of flesh has one suberbly designed feature: a set of spines sticking up from its back, perfectly angled to jab deeply into your foot. The spines are sturdy and sharp. Once they've pierced your foot, a very efficient set of four venom glands start squirting poison into your flesh. Stonefish venom can kill you -- but only if you're lucky. Most researchers agree that a stonefish sting is the most intense pain a human being can experience. An Australian surfer who was stung wading out to the waves said that even though the doctors gave him shot after shot of morphine, the pain was unendurable, completely beyond anything he'd ever experienced. He only stopped screaming to beg the doctors to cut off his leg. When they refused, he asked them to kill him. When he lunged for a scalpel to stab himself with, they tied him to the bed and let him scream. The agony went on for months. Even when the pain fades, the victim is likely to suffer nerve damage and will never walk properly again.

The Scabies Mite

Of all the mites, the species which has created the most misery is the scabies mite. You can't look at a photo of this thing very long if you want to maintain the belief that Nature loves you. It's a "pearly white, plump, oval, eyeless mite with rudimentary legs." Instead of legs, the mite has "stout, blunt spines" which project from the fat belly, designed to help the mite embed itself more firmly under your skin. Its eight legs are too short to be of use, though the wet-noodle-like extensions from the tips of the legs come in handy once inside its human flesh burrow. In short, it looks like a vampire blimp with ropes hanging down. Humans are the only species S. Scabiei parasitizes. We're its home, its planet, and its prey. You shaken hands with any strangers lately? Y'have? Well, you might want to wash your hands, preferably with pesticide, since the Scabies Mite is especially fond of the creases and thin skin on the webs between fingers. It can also live for up to 48 hours outside of human flesh. Say, for example in a hotel bed. The mite plunges into your skin and sets up home in the top layer, the most sensitive and tender. It chews tunnels through your flesh, creating little egg-sites as it goes like queen monster in Alien. The itching caused by Scabies mites is the most intense known to man. And itching, as a recent study confirmed, is actually harder to bear than pain. Victims usually rip their skin off in the attempt to get at their tormentors and stop the itch. In babies, AIDS victims & other "immunologically compromised" people and bedridden paralytics, the skin becomes "honeycombed" -- that's the term they use -- with tunnels full of mite-shit and mite-eggs. Patients with this sort of scabies commonly beg for death and often kill themselves if they can..



The Guinea Worm

"If there's anything in nature that might call God's plan into question, it's the Guinea Worm." -- Tom Paulson 3/23/2001, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Guinea Worm got its start in Africa. It's a big parasite, growing up to three feet long. By the time it pokes its head out of the victim's skin, it's as wide as a strand of spaghetti. It's a slow developer, spending up to a year squirming through the victim's body. Europeans first learned of its existence when they saw people limping through African villages in obvious agony, holding long sticks which seemed to be attached to a white string emerging from a leg or arm. Africans explained that these unlucky villagers had become hosts the Guinea Worm. The reason victims were walking around with the worm twirled around a stick was that the worm could only be coaxed out a few millimeters per day. Those who tried to pull it out soon died a terrible death: the worm's head came off, and its body died and putrefied inside the victim, who rotted while still alive. Victims must hobble around in pain, an object of loathing to everyone, while winding the worm around the stick a little more each day, keeping it close, waking and sleeping. If they drop it, the worm breaks off in their body and they die, putrefying from the inside out. As Africans explained to the European travellers, dozens of Guinea Worms often develop inside their victims at different rates. So a few hours after the victim has finally gotten rid of a worm, another is getting ready to chew its way through the skin and greet the world.

On 1st blush, one's initial thought is to shake one's head and think "Yup, the world's a nasty place, and things'll getcha." But stop and consider just these five horrors. There are others, but I think these suffice. If you believe in Intelligent Design, then these guys didn't just come about by exploiting ecological niches -- God designed them that way! God specifically made a parasite that burrows needlessly into the lungs just so it can inflict permanent painful coughing just to get back where it started in the first place. God created a fish whose only function is to sit on under water and make people scream in pain. God specifically engineered a mite to make people litterally tear their own faces off in despair. God created organisms whose purpose, whose design is to inflict misery, terror and agony. How easily God could have either not had these creatures, or else modified them to be less harmful. We've already got dust-mites and eyelash mites that do their mite-y things just fine; why on earth should we have a mite whose sole purpose is to cause people to commit suicide and go to hell? Or a worm that doesn't just kill its human host, nor does it merely eat it alive from the inside out, but inflicts constant terror that at any instant a wrong move could sentence him or her to a slow death by rotting(!) alive?

Who would engineer such things? The designer of creatures like these (and there are plenty more to choose from, especially if you expand the victims to include non-humans) makes Pol Pot look like Santa Claus! Stalin, Hitler, MacCarthy, Nero... all of them wrapped up together don't match up to the sheer malice of the designer and creator of creatures like these. If you really believe in intelligent design, then you have to believe that God wants us to suffer, and to suffer dearly. This isn't just the normal theological "problem of suffering/evil" like Dostoevsky talks about, the "why does God let people be evil to each other" question -- these terrors come straight from the hand of God, no human interference necessary.

If you're a Christian and believe in Intelligent Design, you have to do one of the following:

1. Insist creatures like this are the result of Adam & Eve's fall: People for thousands of years being tormented and punished because two people who were literally created not to know right from wrong didn't do as they were told. What kind of a jerk would do that? We call that kind of behavior evil. You might as well believe God and Satan are the same being.
   
2. Explain that the world is a vale of tears designed for us to suffer in, in the immortal words of Screwtape: "a world where moral issues really come to a point". Not necessarily a bad escape hatch, but only if you're willing to do like the Catholics and High Protestants (Church of England, &c.) and accept the reason for such: to guide our actions, or, in other words, you have to give up on the whole "faith is all you need" garbage and actually read the Epistle of James ("Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the demons also believe, and tremble! But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?") But even the Catholics don't believe this! Both Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury believe in and support the theory of evolution. Even they, with all their penances & fasts, won't go that far.
   
3. Take the zealot's approach, and consider that the poor victims of these species are being punished, that this's God's way of hitting the "smite" button on his keyboard. Or, the superficially gentler but more insidious tack of calling them "chastisements to bring people back to virtue" that was so popular during the Inquisition. Although this kind of rhetoric is very popular among 700-Club types (you know, the people who terrorize their own children with threats of perdition for reading Harry Potter or for trick-or-treating?), can you honestly say that a four year old child could do anything to deserve howling pain that even morphine can't diminish, for the added crime of stepping on something that looks like a rock?
4. Abandon your faith & embrace the Manichean Herisy: If you claim that God only created the nicer creatures, and nightmares like the creatures above are the works of the devil, then you're claiming that the devil has the power to create, that God is not the sole creator of the universe, but that he's one of them and will (hopefully) prevail over the bad guy at some point in the future. Wrong answer! The devil's only power is to tempt and seduce; if you claim that the devil has the power to create, you are not Christian.
   
5. Disregard one of the principal messages of the New Testament, that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life" and go back to the Book of Job wherein it's said "God screws us over as he pleases, and that's all there is to it." (Yes, I'm disregarding the happy ending that the Jews bolted onto the end of the story because its original contents were too bleak and depressing.) I have never heard of a sect of Christianity that, in wanton disregard of the gospels, claims that God is unmoved by our tears and heedless our suffering, but if you want to start such a church, good luck to you.
   

Or, you can give up on Intelligent Design. Isn't that so much easier?