Safety Fork, the

I wonder if most shirts are sold to people fatter than me. I wonder because I had to take two shirts back to the store yesterday. I normally buy large shirts, but when I bought these, the large size looked, well, really large. The medium size looked about right, but when I got home I discovered that they were a little too narrow across my shoulders. They fit well otherwise. It wouldn’t seem to make sense for shirt manufacturers to size shirts for the abnormally rotund, but if they don’t, then they must be selling more medium shirts to smaller, fatter men. An odd conclusion to reach; as I spend most of my time behind a book or a computer, I am not particularly svelte.

Also yesterday, I saw an amazing rainbow as I was going home after dinner. A whole arch was visible, end to end in vibrant color. Unfortunately, by the time I got home and back outside with my camera, it had mostly faded.

I just realized what bothers me about intelligent design theory. I wish I would have thought of it before or during the John Adams Society debate last month.

I can’t explain the origin of life; I wasn’t then. As far as I know, nobody was taking notes at the time. I do observe that life exists, and I postulate therefore that life exists somehow.

Intelligent design will insist that it agrees, and that the somehow of the origin of life is an intelligent Designer. Meaning, in so many words, God. (If you are a ’scientific’ intelligent design advocate, please forgive me using God; it’s shorter to type.)

Here’s the rub: the theory includes God both as proof and proved. Life exists because God designed life and we know that God must exist because we observe that life exists. I reject this because I hold as an axiom that nothing unreal exists.

I do not simultaneously reject the existence of God. Let us assume that God is real, and that God did indeed design life. By some means, God created life where there was none before. We must then realize an implication and a question.

Assuming God is real and God designed life, then intelligent design also begs its own question: What is the origin of God? Is God alive? If yes, then intelligent design is irrelevant because it does not explain the origin of the designer. If no, then what is the nature of God, by which God influences existence? God must possess choice, because the theory requires an intelligent designer, so God cannot be a property of existence, a set of predictable natural laws. Ergo God must exist—must be within existence. The only other possibility is that God does not exist, in which case the theory is disproved.

We are left to consider the implication that God is why life exists, but not how. Since God is within existence, God must be affecting it by some means. At every turn in human history, the unexplained has been attributed to God. Science does not hold that it rains because of God, that volcanoes erupt due to God, or that God, ergo the heavens spin about the earth. Yet these were once held as truth. Is God the reason? Perhaps. Certainly God is not the method, and the history of science should not lead one to hold that POOF is God’s method. Thermodynamics, geology, and celestial mechanics are the methods of precipitation, vulcanism, and day and night. If God designed life and God is real, then intelligent design fails as a scientific theory; intelligent design is a straw man presented in an attempt to shift the question from how life exists to why life exists.

The origin of life may be an unanswerable question. It may be that no record of the earliest life will ever be found. But do not appeal to me that a question is answered because no one has yet figured out the answer; POOF is not a process I will accept.

I was going to write this post sitting outside on my balcony, but your star burns too brightly for even this computer’s screen. In fact, the whole point of writing this post was going to be that I was writing it while sitting outside on my balcony.

Done with work this afternoon, I was delighted to find that it is roughly room temperature outside. I drove home with my car windows open, thinking about sitting outside writing this post because I was that excited at being able to sit outside.

I’ve thought about living somewhere with a warmer climate, but I don’t want to. It’s really these first few weeks in the spring when I really appreciate going outside. It’s okay now that it’s been freezing cold for months. I need the contrast.

So anyway, I’m going outside.