Intelligent Design Proves God is Dead

A lock implies a locker

One of the arguments regarding the existence of a cosmic muffin (absent any actual proof) given by adherents of "Intelligent Design" is the Watchmaker Analogy which suggests that design implies a designer. Because we rely on our experience in life as a part of that equation (in our experience when we find a made thing it implies a maker) I discovered that the ID crowd had unintentionally laid a wreath on their deceased creator's missing body. They did the dirty work. I just brought along the mop.

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The Watchmaker Analogy is not a theory, it is what it says it is: an analogy, and one that pleased the ID crowd ever so much. It is important to remember that one can say just about anything to a believer as long as it seems to add mortar to the bricks of said belief. Anything that makes that ground of belief tremble is to be avoided at any and all cost. Logic is therefore evil, yet it is logic that is putatively used in the Watchmaker Analogy: the appearance of design implies a designer (AODIAD) and in the case of Western Monotheism we know who that designer is: The Great White Father/Black Uncle/Brown Cousin. Once pernicious logic is let out of its dark and heinous bag it will perform all sorts of mischief, mark my words, and that is what has happened in this case.

The Watchmaker Analogy relies on our experience as conscious human beings to make the reference work: we have seen watches, we have seen buildings, we have seen roads, and in each case we know that such things were built by people. We see bird nests and know that birds built them, we see termite mounds and know that termites built them, etc. What the ID crowd wants us to accept as a "quantifiable fact" is that everything in Nature has design elements, and therefore implies a (most likely single, middle-aged bipolar male) designer of the manifested world. We are to believe this because our experience tells us so: we are not to believe this idea based only on faith but on our experience of the observable world. Experience + Dogma = Intelligent Design.

The unintended consequence of this foray into a sloppy sort of logic is a salient corollary: as we have experienced designs and designers in our lives, so too we humans have experienced the loss of friends and family, or public personalities, or pets or neighbors or...it goes on and on. Someone we knew grew old and died: we never saw them in the flesh again. Perhaps they died young, in school, and they never graduated (The Lovely Bones comes to mind). Perhaps we knew someone casually, and after not seeing them for a long time we came to find that so-and-so had perished, and we never saw that person again. Not remarkable this situation, though we will sometimes tell tall tales as we sit around the fire in the dark of night, stories of the dead walking among the living and voting for Pat Buchanan when we know they would have voted for Al Gore, but I digress. Our experience tells us that if someone is really old and we don't see them for another thirty years and they were ninety when we last saw them they are no longer alive.

So experience tells us two things: if there is a watch it implies a designer, and if we don't see someone for one hundred and thirty years then that entity is dead. Anyone see where we're headed here?*

The western god has not been seen in centuries. Evidence of design or not, there is evidence (based upon our experiences of this life) that if such a god existed he/she/it/Melvin is quite logically dead. If we are to believe, via logic, that design implies a designer than how can we not then understand that such a designer is not pining for the fjords but rather has ceased to be, and shall never be again. The truth of Christianity is that, akin to Monty Python, if they hadn't nailed that beautifully plumed deity to his perch...well, enough said. See you at the grave.

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Author's Note: as a pantheist I believe everything is Nature, whose ultimate source is also everything else--beyond that I can only postulate, or on a good day simply make shit up that pleases me.

Originally posted at Mortaljive.

*We do see some things that have passed away, or more accurately the light they emitted, the prime example being stars, whose light travels at 186,000 miles per second as if being in a hurry was an end in itself. Due to the vastness of space we see stars which are actually no longer "alive" and you should avoid buying them drinks. This also applies to certain movie trailers.

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