world in my eyes

Man has always been, and will always be, a frail, frightened creature that has an unparalleled need to make sense of an often chaotic and random world. As such, he has taken to worshipping the various forces of nature, heaven, and earth, to enforce the idea that others are ultimately responsible for their well-being, luck, survival, etc. It allows them to pass off responsibility to supernatural forces… "it’s god’s will," or "the devil made me do it."

All religion stems from that ultimate need to make sense of the universe. Among the many ways those of a religious bent use to prove the idea that there is an all-powerful God hovering above us is intelligent design.

Proponents of intelligent design believe that there is an "intelligent" force or agent ultimately responsible for certain features of the universe and all its creatures. They deny the value or veracity of natural selection because it leaves the success or failure of mankind up to chance and… to an idea that isn’t based on compassion… a proponent of intelligent design disregards the basic idea that the strongest and fittest shall survive and not the meek, just, and moral. This is an unacceptable ideology to someone who believes that good always triumphs over evil.

When a feature or ability of a given creature defies scientific explanation, for instance the Bombadier Beetle, most intelligent design proponents choose to believe that it is the work of divine intervention or supernatural meddling. In most cases, they use this idea to prove that god exists and because god exists, then evolution can’t be true. Intelligent designers, afterall, are nothing more than modern-day creationists.

Arguing with a creationist or their modern day breathren, the intelligent designers, is a fruitless exercise. Not because rational thought is lost on them, it is of course, but because regardless of what you tell them, regardless of what you show them, they’ll stand up and say the world is flat… just like the church did hundreds of years ago when heretics like Galileo posited that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. You can always count on religion to ignore the obvious if it doesn’t promote their ideas.

Like early sailors who believed the Earth was flat and one could sail off the end of the world, people who subscribe to intelligent design are clearly functioning without reason, believing in the most absurd ideas because they have "faith." These are the same people who argue that a beetle’s ability to concoct an explosive chemical within its carapace without blowing itself to smithereens and are usually the first to discount the existence of dinosaurs despite millions of skeletal remains that prove otherwise…

I don’t know much, but I do know we don’t know much about anything. Among the things I do know though is that intelligent design is wishful thinking. It is also willful ignorance because it discounts hundreds of years of science and rational thought. And that is where I start to wonder whether or not the problems we have as humans stem from our inability to just accept that we may never know what’s what. That our problems stem from our continuous need to make sense of a senseless world. Something’s got to give folks and clearly reason is the first thing to be thrown off the foundering ship that is religion. Like a psychotic that just "knows" that people are listening to his conversations, a religious nut just "knows" that god created man and the world he rules and no amount of old bones, celestial evidence, or scientific conjecture will sway him/her from the foundation of their belief.

I don’t discount that there is magic afoot. Happy accidents have always been magic to me anyway. That we’re here on Earth against all odds proves that there is magic still. The questions we should be asking are not, "Why are we here?" and "where do we come from?" but instead, the questions should be, "Why are we STILL here?" and "where are we going?"

Part Two, in which I prove the existence of idiots, Coming Soon!