the rix mix

President George W. Bush, who converted to Methodism but usually attends an Episcopal Church, has endorsed "intelligent design." I suggest that the Prez knows even less than me about evolution or design. My problem with "intelligent design" is that it isn't always so intelligent. Surely the Designer, while leaving us with the free will that makes us so sinful & troublesome, could have come up with some better planetary recycling scheme than plate tectonics. I know "I am that I am" required earthquakes, volcanoes & tsunamis to destroy decadent, immoral cities & civilizations, but why should an omnipotent deity be expected to provide explanations for these we can figure out scientifically? & why visit these stupendous geological events upon the innocent? Hurricanes are climatic thermostats that redistribute energy, but couldn't the storms just do this without touching land? Would've been simple for God to arrange that. Why make birds fly ten thousand miles just so they can be at Cape May when the Horseshoe Crabs spawn their little green eggs? Why make all the Earthly & extraterrestrial machinery so ... complicated? & so wasteful? But in raising these questions I have already left the realm of science & entered theologyland, & a rather dumbed-down theology at that, where one can ride the Rollercoaster to Damnation. It's not science, & you don't need it to be Christian. So teach "intelligent design" in Sunday school. Or in a class on Comparative Absurd Religion. Put it on the syllbus with The Mystery of the Winking Jesus statue & Slavery: How Yahweh created the Southern Baptist Convention.

Catholics have been warning protestants about this for a long time. The Roman Church has some hard & embarassing experience in the matter - you recall Galileo - & now generally opts for a larger more unexplainable Divinity, & rarely gets hung up on debates about what Jesus would have said about evolution. I was raised on the lovely notion that The Wandering Young Rabbi enjoyed camping out, & was curious about nature, & even a little baffled. So I think He would have enjoyed chatting with a field botanist. But I'm a sentimentalist in the matter. I'm not being sentimental when I say that throughout the history of Christianity it has periodically been assaulted from within by sectarian epidemics of mass stupidity. We're in the middle of an epidemic.

Read Sam Harris on this subject.