Here are three explan­a­tions for the devel­op­ment of life.

1. Cre­ation­ism
2. Intel­li­gent Design
3. Evol­u­tion by Nat­ural Selection

Which one is the only one hos­tile to Chris­tian­ity? Answer below the fold.

Obser­va­tion shows that Chris­ti­ans and Evol­u­tion can coex­ist. Evol­u­tion has adher­ents from all faiths and none, and it’s hard to see that a lit­eral read­ing of the Bible could actu­ally be anti-Christian. In fact the only explan­a­tion which is incon­sist­ent with a Chris­tian God is Intel­li­gent Design. The pos­i­tion of the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is that it is impossible to say who the designer is, it may be God it may not, it’s impossible to tell. Intel­li­gent Design they argue, says noth­ing of the designer.

This is false.

Using the same logical stand­ards as employed by Intel­li­gent Design the­or­ists it is entirely pos­sible to deduce many qual­it­ies of the designer(s).

Here’s the first. The design­ers have an interest in design. To bor­row the favoured ana­logy (bio­lo­gists may want to find some­thing to bite on) – if the prob­ab­il­ity of a cell form­ing by chance is the same as a tor­nado trav­el­ling through a hangar and assem­bling a 747, then the chance of a designer cre­at­ing a life form by acci­dent is also the same. If we accept that life is ‘irre­du­cibly com­plex’, then design must have been inten­tional. The design­ers have an interest in their cre­ations, which also implies a purpose.

Just because there is a pur­pose to cre­ation it doesn’t neces­sar­ily fol­low that human­ity is the pur­pose. As JBS Haldane noted the design­ers do seem awfully keen on beetles. How­ever ID would sug­gest that humans have a key role to play in creation.

This is because another strand of ID thought is that the uni­verse is fine-tuned to make intel­li­gent life, such as ours pos­sible. Does the Earth pose a hab­it­able envir­on­ment adap­ted to humans as opposed to other anim­als? The Earth has an aston­ish­ing array of envir­on­ments and humans seem uniquely adapt­able to take advant­age of them. We seem to have dwell­ings in more or less every ter­restrial envir­on­ment. If we accept this is an envir­on­ment built for humans what can we say about its pur­pose? ID provides the tools.

Take the bac­terial fla­gel­lum. It’s like an out­board motor so under the laws of ID it is lit­er­ally an out­board motor. This might involve some viol­ence to the mean­ing of the word lit­er­ally, but this is not the issue. The point demon­strates that, in ID, if some­thing is like some­thing then it is some­thing. The fla­gel­lum is like a motor so it is a motor. What is the fine-tuned envir­on­ment like?

Con­sider the cow. The cow lives a charmed life. The fields are con­stantly man­aged to provide a depend­able sup­ply of food. It has machinery developed to milk it thus remov­ing a major cause of mast­itis. Dur­ing the winter months it is housed in a barn and fed whilst snow cov­ers the ground. If any of these factors were not fine-tuned then cow life, as we know it, could not pos­sibly exist. Thus a farm would appear to be a fine-tuned envir­on­ment. Is the Earth a human farm?

I think not. There is a clear and demon­strable pur­pose to a farm. If design­ers were eat­ing humans or their pro­duce then we could con­clude that the design­ers are farm­ing us. How­ever it is bac­teria, scav­engers or tigers in Las Vegas which eat us. None of these seem to also prac­tice design. Thus the farm explan­a­tion of ID can be ruled out. There is another man­aged envir­on­ment which does fit rather better.

Humans not only kill anim­als for food. They also kill them for sport. Game reserves are eco­lo­gic­ally diverse hab­it­ats often cre­ated to favour one spe­cies, for instance the deer parks of Eng­land. Nev­er­the­less they form eco­sys­tems built from diverse spe­cies not unlike the Earth. The favoured spe­cies also tends to be unique in its type. One spe­cies of deer for instance. As a cor­rel­a­tion the Earth has just one spe­cies of human. Could the Earth be a park for the hunt­ing of humans?

Again there is the ques­tion of whether or not there is evid­ence for a hunt. This can be found in game parks in the remains of hunt­ing equip­ment whether it be ammuni­tion or a broken bow or whatever. How would design­ers hunt humans? The answer is in sex.

The design­ers gave humans a power­ful libido and also the tend­ency to mate dur­ing any time of a female’s cycle. This is rare and thus indic­ates that repro­duct­ive organs were of great interest to the design­ers. They also pro­duced a vari­ety of bioweapons spe­cific­ally designed to be trans­mit­ted through sexual behaviour.

The ideas that sexual dis­eases are a divine cre­ation sent to plague human­ity is not new. Many fun­da­ment­al­ists believe that AIDS is a pun­ish­ment from God. If God is men­tally retarded then this is plaus­ible. A men­tally retarded God would be unable to fore­see the deaths of hae­mo­phil­i­acs or chil­dren from the dis­ease. Logic­ally this pos­i­tion is hard to hold. While many ele­ments of design in nature seem to be a bit stu­pid the pun­ish­ment from God the­ory fails to explain the sheer vari­ety of sexual dis­eases. A designer inter­ested in humans and a dis­like of sexual immor­al­ity would cre­ate a vari­ety of types of human and just one dis­ease, the Pain­ful Sex-Death Virus. Yet there is a huge vari­ety of sexual dis­eases. How can this be?

Sexual dis­eases are like the weaponry used to hunt deer. One could use an atlatl, or a bow and arrow or semi-automatic weaponry for hunt­ing armour plated deer. The device used reflects the skill and the interests of the sports­man. Equally the vari­ety of sexual dis­eases sug­gests that these reflect the interests of the design­ers. By fla­gel­lum logic these dis­eases are lit­er­ally hunt­ing weapons. They must surely be cre­ated as such if they are irre­du­cibly complex.

Equally just as one hunter tends to have a favoured weapon, so the design­ers also seem to have their own chosen tools. The SARS designer based some­where in Asia now seems to be hav­ing another go at human­ity with the Bird Flu Virus.

Thus there are some con­clu­sions that Intel­li­gent Design does per­mit us to draw about the designer.

• Design­ers design intentionally
• Design­ers design with a purpose
• Design­ers design with an intent that fea­tures should be used.
• One who believes the designer should be obeyed would advoc­ate use of these fea­tures in the example above this would be, a libido and sexual organs.
• The vast vari­ety of dis­eases and lack of diversity of humans indic­ates that the pur­pose of cre­ation is the spread of dis­ease rather than humans.

Both the concept of a malevol­ent designer and the concept of designer who desires promis­cu­ity is con­trary to the view of main­stream Chris­tian­ity. It would appear to be false to state that ID would put Chris­tian doc­trine in schools. The closest theo­lo­gical equi­val­ent to the con­clu­sions of ID would appear to be Satan­ism. This would be coher­ent with the press releases of the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute which do not rule out the pos­sib­il­ity of a Satanic cre­ator.

Fol­low­ing the logic of Intel­li­gent Design the idea that design­ers con­sist­ent with Intel­li­gent Design could be the Chris­tian God is about as likely as a whirl­wind fly­ing over the key­board of a com­puter at the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute and typ­ing out the Bible (King James Version).

* * *

The reason ID has proven suc­cess­ful in gain­ing sup­port from some sec­tions of the com­munity is that some people think that the Bible is a optional part of Chris­tian­ity. Evol­u­tion doesn’t say any­thing about God or Satan because these are not issues evol­u­tion tackles. If Evol­u­tion is athe­istic then recipe books, road maps and email addresses that don’t men­tion God are also athe­istic. For evol­u­tion any God that exists is not part of the cre­ation and so out­side the theory.

For ID the oppos­ite is true. The cre­ator is intim­ately tied to cre­ation because the designer designs and so ID does make claims on the qual­it­ies of a cre­ator. ID is the only explan­a­tion of cre­ation which expli­citly requires that we should be just as will­ing to credit Satan with cre­ation as the Chris­tian God.