'Intelligent (sic) Design (sic)'

Science is a particular, rigorous discipline, one that is cheapened whenever some crackpot takes advantage of a widespread misunderstanding of the word ‘theory’ to try and float a real cunt of one with some legitimacy. This is today’s problem.

Many of these are not paid much heed; few people fight to force the view that aliens built the pyramids, that the flying spaghetti monster was the unmoved mover of the Universe, the Kantian theory that the life forms on Pluto – and there are life forms on Pluto – must be hyper-efficient and closer to a perfect rationality due to the planet’s essential nature, that math is a ‘universal language’ and not a human construct, that the true source of genius is always repressed homosexuality, that the presence of an epicanthic fold in both Asians and people with Down’s syndrome implies that Asians are retarded, Linnaeus’s taxonomical classifications for racial subspecies (afer, americanus, asiaticus, europaeus, and monstrosus), and any other idiotic, anti-scientific theory you’d like to name into primary schools. This bullshit inundates us, true; but from TV shows, pop science publications, bad movies, quack (but accredited!) academicians with inexhaustible air supplies, crazy millionaires, and the ever-educational internet. Not primary school classes. The people who promote these theories don’t take advantage of the word ‘theory’ – as opposed to ‘fact’ – when promoting their wrongheaded bullshit; they just say it. Unlike the following group:

Christians seem to have a particularly thick nature – morbidly sensitive, they run from life, shrieking like an air-raid siren being anally raped by a Swedish fist, but, from a safe distance, try to force it into an entirely alien box. Faith can be well and good, but it isn’t if you don’t pursue it honestly. Take Kierkegaard as your guide. Honest faith is not pseudo-science pursued with the fury of a proselytizing religion; nor is it genuine science. This whole affair is little more than clever bullying, playing at seeming respectable.

Faith is and can only be a belief in something for which there is no proof. By definition, it does not need, or want, proof; you cannot have faith in something proven. It is entirely separate from knowledge and its power is derived from that separation. There is absolutely no need for this bullshit Christian (sic!) science (sic!). Neither Christianity nor science demands or can permit it.

The existence of this ‘science’ can only be attributable to these pseudo-religious demagogues who seem determined to run roughshod over my country, guzzling gullibility and spitting out full-formed, easy-swallow capsules of paranoiac, pseudo-Christian bullshit. The Falwells and Robertsons of our unfortunate world do have faith, a febrile, unshakeable, neurotic, unreflexive faith. But they’re too focused on indoctrinating America into their execrable, deformed Weltanschauung through horizontally integrated propaganda to have time for genuine faith. This is advertising, not religion. Certainly not science. Pat Robertson owns a television station and one of the best-endowed film schools in my country for this reason; it also motivates this attempt to exploit language to transmogrify bad theology into good science. Advertising.

Science is fantastic for a few reasons, biggest of which is that there are fucking rules that every scientist knows and enforces. Many fields have rules, but a lot of the practitioners are unfortunately very comfortable with ignoring them; scientists, on the other hand, are predisposed to rigor. What are these rules? To me, the most important with regard to this debate are as follows:

- Uniformitarianism. This means that the way the world works is and has been throughout the ages the same everywhere, permitting no change without a natural explanation.

-Falsifiability. If something is falsifiable this means it is possible to prove it wrong, so that, if mistaken, it will be replaced.

-Ockham’s Razor: ‘plurality is not to be posited without necessity.’ Explanations of phenomena should not be allowed to indulge in unnecessary complexity.

-Unending self-criticism. Science is not satisfied with anything less than the truth. Any and every theory, no matter how elegant or well-liked, will be hacked down, thrown away, and replaced by one which better conforms to the world if need be.

It should be clear that these guidelines feed into one another. A claim that something in the supernatural realm intruded into reality and caused what appears to be caused by some other natural phenomenon to occur would offend all these standards and generally be fucking unscientific.

This kind of offense against scientific method well defines the theory put forth by proponents of Intelligent Design, whose chief evidence is either a misapplication of some scientific principle (‘The complexity of x would be most simply explained by some creative intelligence having designed it’) or a gross suspension of natural laws (‘Carbon dating is invalid because the antediluvian layer of water hung suspended around the Earth and interfered with the radiation that buffeted the Earth before the Flood, making all radioactive dating inaccurate and its practice a test from God’). This is not science, it just plays at it. Not good Christianity either; God’s not supposed to be lying to or tricking us. That’s the Devil’s job, and a good Christian shouldn’t confuse the two because it suits him.

The mere existence of Intelligent Design bespeaks the pervasiveness of an insecure, irrational, unscientific, non-religious mindset, and it is puzzling why it should even be considered as an alternative to the more satisfying theories presented by legitimate science. I attribute this to a few things: the peculiar American religiosity; the Manichean belief that divides this world into Christians and Anti-Christians, both of which are believed to be proposing theories of the world’s makeup for identical reasons (i.e. religious propaganda); and some confusion over terms, such as ‘theory’ and ‘fact,’ as alluded to above.

American religiosity, and American Manicheanism, are familiar enough to us all, and the causes for them so complex, that I feel I don’t need to give them space here. Let it suffice to say that American Protestantism is not an examination of faith but a dictatorship of spirit striving to manifest itself into flesh, and that the American idea of devotion is a ‘with me or against me’ attitude that tends to attribute to one’s ‘enemy’ everything one believes and plans to do. Thus religion sees scientific attempts to explain existence as a deliberate attack; while it is a threat, science doesn’t have to have religion in its sights. Science is not so concerned with building itself up or destroying competing cosmologies as being RIGHT within its own system. Religion, on the other hand, definitely has science in mind when it collects or makes up this bullshit to paint over the halls of knowledge in a deliberate parody of science.

The word ‘theory’ does not indicate that something is false; it indicates that it is awaiting a valid counter-proof. Whether or not this counter-proof is even possible is not implied by the word. When used correctly, the word ‘theory’ signifies something that has submitted to the scientific method. Defenders of Intelligent Design like to take the word ‘theory’ and play it against the word ‘fact’ – a theory is not a fact, and, facts being true, is hence false. If we can take Umberto Eco’s definition of a moron (‘a master of parologism’) as accurate, these people are certainly morons of the first order, but their claims to being scientific are undercut by this obvious lack of understanding of the field’s technical lexicon. Unfortunately, due to an existing defect in primary education in this country, this lack is so widespread that this spurious distinction appears valid to the Christ Ad Agency’s target demographic.

Intelligent Design is not science. It’s not good religion either; if (and it’s arguable) there is anything beautiful about religion it is not and cannot be what is beautiful about science. Anybody who cares about either field should be profoundly offended by this cheap, cloying, manipulative smegma that threatens to foster further idiocy in the next generation of American schoolkids. The education system here is in serious need of positive reform to stave off the slide into idiocy, not the transfer of control to the loudest idiots of the day. It needs to be fixed, not fucked, or we’ll be faced with generations more execrable than those we already have.