One of the things about Intelligent Design – one of the ones that its proponents kinda sorta want to cover up, but only when it’s being used against them in debate – is that if you accept the basic hypothesis that the universe is a designed artifact, you can infer certain things about the nature of the designer and its intelligence from a close study of said artifact.
Given that the universe, as we understand it, seems to be more or less optimized for human habitation (or, as evolution says, humans are optimized to inhabit the universe), one has to assume that the intelligence of the designer is not so very dissimilar from that of humanity.
There are several possibile candidates for who the Intelligent Designer (or Designers) might be:
- an alien race
- our own descendants, who have mastered the science and/or magick of time travel
- God (you know, that dude from the Bible)
And, of course, one other possibility.
True agnosticism requires an open mind. Ideally, one should strive to be as close to impartial and objective as possible in evaluating any claim – and especially those of faith.So when it comes to evaluating various creation stories, well, none of them seem terribly plausible to me. They all involve an uncreated creator of some description, although to be fair, the Big Bang theory suffers from the same flaw. (I once heard it described as “In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” It’s an over-simplification, but one with a certain charm, I think.)
But there are degrees of plausibility. The Big Bang theory – and cosmology in general – is the best developed theory, and the only that features a continuous narrative or any real account of what predates creation.
The idea that the world was created in any of the creation myths of various religions and cultures on the other hand, usually begins with the assumption that there were always oceans, and something or someone rose up out of them. And it’s here I part company with the atheists.
It’s easy to poke holes in the creation story that appears in Genesis, not least because there are actually two contradictory accounts of the creation in the first three chapters of that book. But I think that’s missing the point.
To me, the real problem is the idea that a world as complex and contradictory as ours was created by a single individual, regardless of their level of power and insight.
To assert instead that the world was created by a squabbling committee of less powerful (although still divine) beings seems far more sensible.
Don’t get me wrong, I regard both explanations as highly improbable, just as I do all other variations on Intelligent Design. But talking generally, polytheistic explanations, on balance, seem just a little less improbable than monotheistic ones.
I mean, if our creators (and other gods) are, as they often seem, largely projections of ourselves writ inordinately large, then surely a highly politicised and endlessly disagreeing committee of partial powers is more likely than the kind of renaissance-man omni-power that the People of the Book believe in?
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