Hullabaloo

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

 
Searching For God In Fish Entrails

by tristero

It truly is hard to find a better example of what is wrong with "intelligent design" creationism than a paper from a creationist website PZ discusses here:

It's titled "COMPLEX LIFE CYCLES IN HETEROPHYID TREMATODES: STRUCTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DESIGN IN THE ASCOCOTYLE COMPLEX OF SPECIES", by Mark Armitage. Oooh. Sounds so sciencey. And then you read further, and you see that it almost follows the correct form.

It has the difficult title. It has a list of keywords. It has an abstract. There's an introduction: it contains a brief summary of the complex life history of these trematode parasites, which are small invertebrates that live in the internal organs of fish, and it promises something...

Then the paper has a materials and methods section, just like the big boys — the author extracted parasites from fish and used light and scanning electron microscopy to look at them. Finally, there's a discussion and conclusion.

Notice anything missing? Right, no results.

Well, actually, there are results. Sort of. The result is, "it's much too complicated to have arisen by chance" which is another way of saying, "I'm too fucking lazy to bother to figure this out. God done it."

But let's play a thought experiment and simply accept the conclusion that it is "irreducibly complex" and God did indeed design a life history of trematode parasites. It isn't and it evolved, but you know, let's just say, for the sake of argument.

So what?

What a far cry that concept of God is from the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, smiting enemies hither and yon, making the sun stand still! Gone is the God of the Gospels with a redemptive message of forgiveness uttered from the mouth of a crucified man betrayed and abandoned by his closest followers. This God, the God of creationism, is a dorky obsessive compulsive preoccupied with minutiae - I expect this God to wash His hands every five minutes and to check the locks.

In short, creationists provide a trivializing notion of what is meant by God, an illustration that "God of the Gaps" is not only non-science but crummy theology. Sure, the life history of trematode parasites will be explainable by natural causes should anyone care enough to study it closely (or, strictly speaking if you insist, it's far too early to throw up one's hands and say, "I dunno, whatever"). More importantly, no non-scientist searching for the meaning of God cares one way or the other whether the development of trematode parasites are "irreducibly complex." No one will ever start a prayer, "O God, without whom trematode parasites would not now live their parasitic lives in fish guts..."

What a bleak, sad universe these people live in. Bad enough their view of reality is thoroughly out of focus. They have a stunted imagination to boot.

[UPDATE: "God of the Gaps," for those who never heard the term, is the notion that God is where science has yet to find a natural explanation. The creationists keep on coming up with examples of "irreducible complexity" and science keeps on finding natural reasons for the complexity, not "intelligent design." Thus God gets pushed out as science explains the natural world until the concept of Supreme Being is reduced to an entity that designed a bacteria's tail. ]

tristero 4/02/2008 09:59:00 AM |