No Intelligent Life
Yesterday I was in the local library and I noticed a box by the front door stuffed with magazines. The box had "Take These" written on the side, so I took out the one on front, an issue of National Geographic. On the back cover is a Toyota ad with an SUV parked on a slanted rock outcropping with no roads in sight. The caption reads:
NO INTELLIGENT LIFE OUT HERE. JUST YOU.
Some people might take issue with this by claiming that God is out there and God is intelligent. But I'm sure that wasn't Toyota's point. They weren't saying there is no God. What they were implying is that this Toyota SUV can take you to places where there are no other people but you. I can do that with a 1994 Chevy Cavalier with 217,000 miles on it, but that's because I live in Maine. I wouldn't expect a National Geographic reader in New York City to try it.
But that's not my point...
What this ad inadvertently says is that there is no intelligent life in nature except for mankind. That claim is an easy one for an advertisement to make because that's been a mainstay in civilized thought for centuries if not millennia. We civilized humans have deceived ourselves into believing that we and God are the only intelligence on earth.
This morning when I looked at that ad, I realized that this is the problem with the theory of intelligent design. The fundamental claim in the theory of intelligent design, the one connection between that theory and science, is the claim that science can find no intelligent mechanism in evolution and that life is too complex to have evolved through random mutation. Stated more simply, there is no intelligence in nature. For nature to have evolved, there must have been an intelligent designer because nature itself is not intelligent enough to have done the job.
At the very heart of this argument for intelligent design is this long-held misconception that the only intelligent being on earth is Man and we get our intelligence from our special relationship with God. The rest of nature goes without.
For the record let me state that nothing could be further from the truth.
NO INTELLIGENT LIFE OUT HERE. JUST YOU.
Some people might take issue with this by claiming that God is out there and God is intelligent. But I'm sure that wasn't Toyota's point. They weren't saying there is no God. What they were implying is that this Toyota SUV can take you to places where there are no other people but you. I can do that with a 1994 Chevy Cavalier with 217,000 miles on it, but that's because I live in Maine. I wouldn't expect a National Geographic reader in New York City to try it.
But that's not my point...
What this ad inadvertently says is that there is no intelligent life in nature except for mankind. That claim is an easy one for an advertisement to make because that's been a mainstay in civilized thought for centuries if not millennia. We civilized humans have deceived ourselves into believing that we and God are the only intelligence on earth.
This morning when I looked at that ad, I realized that this is the problem with the theory of intelligent design. The fundamental claim in the theory of intelligent design, the one connection between that theory and science, is the claim that science can find no intelligent mechanism in evolution and that life is too complex to have evolved through random mutation. Stated more simply, there is no intelligence in nature. For nature to have evolved, there must have been an intelligent designer because nature itself is not intelligent enough to have done the job.
At the very heart of this argument for intelligent design is this long-held misconception that the only intelligent being on earth is Man and we get our intelligence from our special relationship with God. The rest of nature goes without.
For the record let me state that nothing could be further from the truth.
posted by Bill | 10:56 AM
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