The overriding theme of intelligent design seems to be that "life is too complex to have evolved on its own, therefore it must have been guided by a supernatural force."
Since the "debate" began I, like most proponets of evolution, start to get caught up in the details...arguments about the evidence for evolution, the disguising of creationism, separation of church and state, legal improprieties in the Dover case, etc.
But I recently had an epiphany.
I went back to that argument about complexity and came to the realization that this is all about ego.
Central to the creationist/ID belief system is that humans are here for a purpose. We are so intelligent, resourceful and unique that we must have been a purposeful creation, right? All events in natural history must have happened in an exact sequence for humanity as we know it to be the eventual result .
We've all seen Back to the Future or Quantum Leap, so we know how seemingly meaningless acts can alter everything. (By the way, check out Primer for a super-smart time travel story.)
So what does Xmas have to do with this?
The ID people are starting with the presumption that humans are a perfect result of a sequence of coordinated events. It's like looking at a mass of tangled christmas tree lights and saying "Wow! That is so complicated, that could never have happened on its own. Someone must have gotten into my attic since last winter, found these lights, and delicately intertwined these strands to create this beautiful tumbleweed of green plastic."
But in fact, that mass of wires could have taken a wholly different shape based on who took them off the tree last year, how carefully they were packed, if the packer was a type A or B personality, if the box containing the lights fell down the attic stairs after the dog bumped into them, or how carefully they were pulled from the box the following winter.
The point is that humanity just happens to look like it looks. We could've had green skin, no skin, scales, or feathers. We might not have even had the capacity to conceptualize a supernatural creator.
As soon as we all stop feeling like perfect little creations, we can start to accept that we are a part of natural history, not just a result of it.
