Dumb-Ass Design Theory

I'm having a crisis of faith. First, creationists convinced me that the complexities of life could never be explained by mere “blind” Darwinian evolution. Consider the perfect aerodynamics of a bird’s wing, designed in just the right shape so that air flow over the front edge of the wing will create lift, allowing the bird to soar in the Intelligent Designer’s beautiful skies. The fibers in the bird’s feathers and the way they grow to overlap are designed for both warmth and aerodynamic efficiency, minimizing drag in flight and allowing warmth when the bird lands and folds its wings around its body. Such perfection! Such beauty! Surely no blind process could produce this, it had to have an Intelligent Designer. Only a divine intelligence could do such superb work. Anything else is just too improbable for me to believe.

And what a designer! Everywhere in the world, we can see evidence of the Designer’s divine wisdom. Ah, the majesty of a redwood forest, that natural cathedral, with the branches and needles designed to collect and condense fog, dripping it onto the spongy ground below to be absorbed by the trees’ shallow roots. And the exquisite beauty of a cherry blossom, trembling and beckoning in the spring breeze, the perfect bait for a bee’s visual and olfactory system. The flower tickling and dusting the bee’s body with pollen as it feeds, and moves on to another flower, cross-pollinating and creating more flowers: nature’s most holy threesome. And all of these creations are so lovely to our own human eyes. My faith in the Intelligent Designer was made deeper and sweeter with each observation. The Designer had made the world with ultimate intelligence expressed in each act of creation. I saw its marvelous design, and worshiped the Designer for these miracles.

How happy I was then! How carefree! Consider the eye, said the creationists, How the muscles surrounding the lens expand and contract to focus light through the lens from different distances. How could that have evolved by chance?

The wonders of eyes don’t stop there. Consider those strange and miraculous creatures, the fish who live in the ocean’s depths, where it is always night: their electrical senses and huge jaws, so perfectly designed for the conditions in those depths where no light reaches. They don’t have eyes, because they don’t need them. Wait, what? Many of them still have eyes? Scientists call them “vestigial” eyes, left over from a past ancestor who lived further up in the ocean where there was light. The fish just don’t use them. Why would the Intelligent Designer create vestigial eyes? It’s a waste of metabolic energy for those fish to grow them, and food is quite scarce in the ocean’s depths. What was the Designer thinking?

Well, perhaps the Designer put more effort into the human eye. We are, after all, the chosen beings of the Creator of the universe. Consider the retina, those light-sensitive cells on the back of the eye, those little miracles that register photons and then send signals back to the brain to be processed further. Such marvels of good design they are. Some can respond to a single photon; some can differentiate color. The light comes in at the front of the cell, and the signal leaves out the back… Wait, what was that you said? Retinal cells are on backwards? The nerve cells/axons that leave the light-sensitive cells actually project out from the front of the cell, and have to loop around to go back to the brain, blocking some light from the light-sensitive parts of the cell? I can’t believe that. Excuse me, Intelligent Designer, but this is the human eye we’re talking about. Did you do this? It’s a hugely inefficient design! What, were you busy doing something else that day? Giving the tiger its stripes or something? Why did you fall down on the job of designing our eyes? We were made in your image! Don’t we rate a little extra care with product design?

OK, how about another input system to the brain: human genitalia. So perfectly designed to create more people, and to give great pleasure while involved in the sacred act of procreation. The female clitoris, that tiny pink bud near the urethra that grows in a girl fetus’ development out of the same tissues that produce the penis in a male fetus. That blossom of female pleasure, so beautifully designed to make sex enjoyable to women so that they will want to procreate with their husbands. Wait, what’s that you say? The clitoris is shaped and placed in such a way that only a small percentage of women can get sexual satisfaction from intercourse? How can the Creator motivate women to procreate if intercourse is not the most fun sexual activity for them? I’m taking this one personally. Had the Intelligent Designer been hitting the communion wine when He designed this thing? What a kluge!

The troubling thing to my faith is that those damned Darwinians (and I do mean damned, literally) say that they can explain these kluge-y features through the gradual accumulation of small, incremental genetic changes, or as byproducts of some other adaptation. My faith is shaken. I need to believe in the wisdom, infallibility and omnipotence of the Intelligent Designer.^* It’s a major crisis, a crisis of faith.

If the Intelligent Designer were a major corporation, we would not tolerate this level of sloppiness in product design. We expect things to work better. We would be filing class action lawsuits, writing letters of complaint, and demanding to know who the design engineers were. With that in mind, I have started my own letter of complaint to the Intelligent Designer:

Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to register a complaint about the following product you issued to me in 1963, my body. There appear to be some major design flaws and I would like you either to fix them or to compensate me accordingly. First of all, there’s the eye...

^* May we all be touched by his noodly appendage. Click here to find out more about the leading alternative to Intelligent Design, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.