Wednesday, August 22, 2007

An Itch to Scratch: Unintelligent Design, or Reducible Stupidity

Balls, the very testicle--that haphazard refugee from the body and its sterilizing heat--offer proof of the opposite of intelligent design.

This shifty pair, rather, proves hasty design:

trailer-park-engineer, duct-tape-spliced-extension-cord, tinfoil-rabbit-ear "entertainment system" design;

neophyte-deity-pulling-an-all-nighter-after-bingeing-all-weekend, hoping-to-pull-a-C- design.

What god except a punishing trickster would've--rather than ensconce the family jewels in, say, an irreducibly complex velvet-lined cooling system secure deep in an abdominal haven--hung these all-important procreative nuggets in a handy sack, providing easy, painful, and potentially emasculating access to dangers as varied as invading hordes, royals who like their singers permanently falsettoed, angry ex-lovers, and careless leg-crossers?

Testicles--those perfunctory dangling shape-shifting afterthoughts fashioned from leftover skin and wires exposed to all manner of nauseating abuses--are prime evidence of theologically shoddy design. I suppose Dr. Behe might say the Prime Mover--the Causus Ballus, if you will--was too busy fashioning the flagellum for bacteria to spend time on a proper house for our homunculi. So, Dr. Behe, I say nuts to your intelligent design, ballocks to your irreducible complexity.

14 comments:

George said...

See, science is painful.

Thanks for not leaving us hanging as to your theories which seem on the ball to me.

Urkat said...

People are still trying to superimpose a face on nature, to co-opt creation with God's help.

Unknown said...

this post is pretty ballsy... don't know how people will cop

Unknown said...

cope!

John Guzlowski said...

Thanks for the funny piece on balls and intelligent design.

Another argument against intelligence design is that you and I, Marty, will die.

We spend a life time learning how to be what we should be, learning how to be good loving people, and then we die.

What kind of sense does that make?

Believers in God will tell me that this is part of God's plan. They’ll tell me there is hope for an afterlife, and that because there is this hope, this existence makes sense. And these believers also tell me that they aren’t surprised that I see life as a silly proposition. Without belief in a creator life is nonsense.

Death is part of God’s plan, they say.

Death is part of God's plan?

And how do we know this? Because it happens? And what happens is right and good?

I can't argue that death happens. I don't need faith to tell me that life ends in death.

But I don’t see death as right and good. I don’t have the faith that would help me accept death joyfully.

From what I've seen of dying, not many people have that faith.

Chryss said...

Perhaps this merely supports the idea that God is a woman. True, she invented the knee, but, what is vulnerable to abuse is accessible for caress... she also invented the cop (as in, "a feel")...

George said...

Queen if you are correct--and how can one doubt a queen?--here's hoping she's a very benevolent god. After all, that's a fine line, the caress-abuse one.

Marty said...

Queen, George, knee fits perfectly in groin, so you both score a point for the goddess. (i.e. an unwanted caress may lead to abuse.)

Yeah, I like cop, too, Amy.

Marty said...

I don't know what to say, John, except to point to Dylan Thomas' villanelle. My grandfather drank and raged, and he was bitter when he died. My grandmother hoped for death and was always disappointed when she came back alive from the hospital. My aunt, who died recently of the same condition as your uncle Charlie, embraced her death. She was ready, but, like my grandmother, she was a believer.

On a more serious evolutionary note, death is necessary to clear the way for the newer models. Conditions change, so adaptation requires birth and death. Death will be obsolete when we master the universe, become the gods we try to believe in. We ain't there yet, and adaptation, unfortunately, necessitates rather than alleviates perishing. When I think about this stuff, I usually come to the conclusion that I'd rather be here than not.

John Guzlowski said...

Death is necessary to clear the way for new improved models?

Hmmm.

Wouldn't it make more sense if we evolved as we live, improving all the time, building up our physical and mental powers the way we add on to our houses?

My balls are unprotected? Let me evolve a exo-structure to protect them from the jocks who unfairly grab during touch football games! Arthritis hits me? How about I evolve a self-lubricating joint lube system?

That seems more sensible than starting afresh every 60 or 70 years.

But this brings us back to God.

My idea sounds reminiscent of Babel, humans building on and on until their structure touches heaven. Then God enters the picture and reminds us that we're just vain human. He wrecks the structure, tears down the tower, visits us with waves of pancreatic cancer and storms of cardiac arrest.

And we're back where we started.

Marty said...

Well, one thing we can do, John, is drink red wine. It makes us live longer and livelier, and we don't need to evolve any further to enjoy it, and each sip enjoyed is its own prayer, of sorts.

John Guzlowski said...

A glass of wine?

Remember the end of Steinbeck's story Chrysanthemums? The farm woman in it dreams of piercing the sky with her heart, finding love that will stand up to hurricanes, opening herself to the spiritual and sensual currents of the universe.

Her husband says something like, "You got to be kidding."

She says, "Well, how about a glass of wine? Wine would be nice."

Urkat said...

Philosophy is a way to kill time while waiting for time to kill us.

Geo-B said...

External vulnerable balls... I've always thought signs of the cobbled-together nature of the body are, naturally, our appendix (just plotting for the inopportune moment to explode) and our eyes which adjust to the light slowly while we wait, exosed to our enemies in the sunlight.