I call it Muston's Law - you can divide the world into an infinite number of two set groups - i.e., there are two kinds of people in this world; those who believe things are so screwed up because a secret cabal is running everything, and those who believe things are so screwed up because nobody is charge. I happen to a member in good standing of both groups. While I believe in the conspiracy of dunces I am also convinced the magical mysticism of sheer chance which is what prevented me from winning the $300 million Power Ball. To provide another example of my Law, there are those who believe in the Theory of Intelligent Design and those who believe those other people should be willing to test their hypotheses by practicing abstinence and removing themselves from the gene pool. Let them just say no for a few years and let's see if the average I.Q. of America goes up a couple of points.
Anyone who has ever witnessed or actually participated in passing a big headed human infant through that miracle of under engineering the human pelvis should be able to testify that human beings are not an intelligent design. If chickens suffered in childbirth as much as the average Jewish mother does, eggs would a LOT more expensive. Cows don't seem to have nearly as much trouble recreating, or sheep, or dolphins or frogs, or even Kangaroos. But we pointy headed bipedal pseudo-monkeys who claim to have been made in God's image, we spend hours thrashing, moaning, screaming and cursing just to give birth to a creature who will be totally dependent on us for twelve years and who will spend the next twelve years telling us how stupid we are.
Of course, to those to whom religion is an excuse to stay stupid, the pain of childbirth is proof of original sin. But how can any individual believe in both Original Sin and Intelligent Design? One principle claims that the logic of creation is proof of the existence of God, while the other claims that God put evil in women's' wombs because one of them once ate an apple. I'm not questioning the Christian theology that concerns Adam and Eve. I'm questioning the logic of Adam and Eve. And I didn't raise the logic of it, the adherents to T.I.D. did.
To me, the apple in the Garden of Eden is merely proof of the dangers of eating fresh fruit. But then I belong to the Church of the Unintended Consequences. We don't believe in anything, and we're very militant about that. The central tenet of our faith is that no matter how benign and gentle your theology, (such as that of Jesus Christ) some idiot will eventually use it as an excuse to butcher everybody who disagrees with them. Our sect also denies the existence of agnosticism - no true agnostic, we believe, would ever say "God damn it", and yet they all do - and we also believe that nihilism eventually leads to a loss of personal identity.
But if you believe in the Theory of Intelligent Design where does the Platypus Duckbill fit into your universe? Following the logic of T. I.D., shouldn't the Platypus' structural contradictions be proof of the non-existence of God? And what about the Smallpox bacillus, which now teeters on the very edge of extinction, almost wiped out by humans. That was certainly intelligent design, and it didn't require God.
I think T.I.D. is based on a rather fundamental (pun intended) misunderstanding about reality. T.I.D is like waking up on First base with amnesia, and assuming you were born on the bag as opposed to having been hit in the head with a fastball at home plate. T.I.D. is mistaking the ticket you get for running a stop sign for Newton's laws of motion that propel your unrestrained body through the windshield. T.I.D. sees the gray squirrel chewing on your cable TV line as an annoying finished product, as opposed to a Darwinian approach which thanks God for the meteorite that barreled out of deep space and smashed into the earth 65 million years ago preventing that twelve foot tall venomous carnivorous squirrel-like dinosaur from every evolving.
And still I can't deny that there is evidence for T.I.D. out there. Eight members of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board, who insisted on teaching T.I.D. to the town's children, are now extinct. And that is certainly evidence of something intelligent floating around the universe. What would it hurt if we called it God?