[Newspoetry] Intelligent Design II

[DL Emerick]

Beyond biology, and comparatively trivial questions,
one comes up against astro-physics.

Is it intelligent that the universe evolved from an explosion several billions of years ago?  Is it intelligent that stars are born, live a long time and die?  Is it intelligent to create a universe full of uncountably many stars and planets and yet only find life on one planet?

The most unintelligent idea man ever had was to assign being to causation -- as if nature does not happen naturally, anyway, as if man is not an accident of nature himself.  Intelligence is counter-factual when it does not understand itself biologically, physiologically, neurologically, mentally as a phenomenon of nature.

The most unintelligent idea is the idea of gods, as the agents of nature.  We've killed off all the other ideas of gods, and yet we have this residuum, this will to bottle our ignorance into some divinity.  It is a natural tendency, to think that life has some ultimate meaning, some significance to someone else.  It has no such meaning, nor any such significance to any other being, except to you yourself, as to the constructions you make of it, to the meaning that you live, as a being.  Intelligence is the intelligence is the measure by which man his ability to change the world, to better fit his own ideas of what would be a better world -- because even if there were something like a god, he surely made a fucked mess of a world for most people to inhabit.