[Newspoetry] Intelligent Design

[DL Emerick]

A matter of no standards -- no natural explanation.

Intelligent design fails intelligence test.

What is intelligence?  If Kansas wants to assert some matter as intelligent, it must tell us first what would be intelligent.

It's not an easy question.

Is it intelligent that weeds grow faster that flowers?

Is it intelligent that poisonous snakes even exist?  Or that flies and fleas, gnats, mosquitoes, and no-see-ums, and a hundred other things like spiders, mites, wasps, killer bees (oops, can't quite blame that one on god, can we?) exist.  How about sharks and eels and jelly fish?  Debatable, for sure, whether this is intelligent design.

Is it intelligent that all matters of natural disaster happen?  Lightning, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes?

Is it intelligent that diseases plague the world?

Is it intelligent that man is as naturally cruel and hateful and selfish as he can be completely otherwise,
but rarely ever is?

And, after the word intelligent, there is this small problem of design.  Design is not necessarily intelligent by any single set of standards.  Design is necessary because it is a matter of compromise -- a recognition of the limits of intelligence itself.  Design is about economy, the efficient use of resources to accomplish some outcome effectively.  It is hard to say whether something is designed well -- let alone intelligently.  For instance, were the concentration camps of the Nazis and Commies, the ones that the US now runs in Eastern Europe, intelligently designed?  Even if they happen to be intelligently designed, they are morally defective.

That's the heart of the counter argument to intelligent design -- it is a naturalistic explanation, totally ignoring the unpleasant questions of actual reality.  It invites us to suspend judgment and decalre with Leibniz, this is the best possible world of all possible worlds.  Thus ends every argument of the conservatives, of the unenlightened, of the ignorant and most pious churches.