Intelligent Design

As any good mechanical engineer can tell you, design will take you only so far.  After that it is up to operations to see to it that utilization continues to improve and productivity increases.  Of course the design of this planet has the same set of problems any industrial mechanism has and that is an, impossible to comprehend, instruction manual.  Probably when translated from the original Chinese into Aramaic it lost some of its clarity. 

 As I have grown older and the number of pharmaceuticals I take for chronic ailments have increased, I have spent more time contemplating the hereafter and what I will soon face now that eternity is a lot closer to my current age than high school….or college….or marriage.  Having spent a good number of years working in technology and science and some number of years believing in an objective reality that exists in and of itself where everything is something and “A is A;” I have mostly been of the belief that man is the highest form of intelligence in the known universe.  Having seen no tangible evidence of any other intelligence, such a notion is pretty easy to hold as the metaphysically given.   

I am also a realist and understand how scary it is to assume that mankind is the highest level of intelligence.  Just looking across the table at my co-workers alludes to just how much trouble we are in as a result of this evolutional oversight.  But we deal with reality as it is presented. 

I am also highly tolerant of those who disagree with me.  People of most faiths are good people and have high hopes for the hereafter based on the existence of something they cannot see or hear, touch, taste or smell.  I say most faiths, because I have no tolerance of faiths that in this day and age still think killing and maiming non-believers is acceptable and/or encouraged by a supreme being.  Any supreme being worth his or her salt would see the futility in such behavior and would have moved on to some other intergalactic bauble elsewhere in the universe.   

I think the desire among some of the people of faith to have “Intelligent Design” taught in a science class, may be direct evidence that I am right and man is at the top of the intellectual escalator.  A supreme being would instantly recognize the utter futility of going into a science class and suggesting that something that science cannot test may be at the heart of everything those in the class are there to consider for testing.  That kind of unreasonableness is hardly a complement to the supposed designer of everything…including reason. 

It is mankind’s nature to question everything.  Our innate curiosity has driven us to invent, and invention has driven us to achieve spectacular heights of technological wonder.  Yet “intelligent design” in the science classroom stops curiosity and invention by explaining all the mystery as an article of faith. 

 Personally I like the idea of not knowing.  I revel in the uncertainty of what comes next.  I would rather be surprised by the hereafter than let down by it.  So I vote that we let science be science and faith be faith and stop trying to end discovery by replacing it with dogma.  Don’t get me wrong.  Dogma has its place.   

Discussions about the origins of the universe belong almost anyplace two or more people gather including the science class.  But science is a discipline of experimentation and evidence.  Where there is no evidence there is no experiment.  Where there is no experiment there is no science.  Even to allow a statement such as; “the origin of the universe might be the result of intelligent design” to be introduced into a science class renders intellectual probing impotent.  You could just as easily say that the universe was created when two unicorns collided with the Easter Bunny.  You can’t prove it, you can’t disprove it, you can’t really even discuss it in the language of science.  So leave it out of the science classroom.