The lowly seer

Unintelligent design

Back-door creationism, or Intelligent Design, is now so popular, even the Catholic Church is getting in on it. But how about its opposite, Stupid Design?

For example, what about your appendix, an utterly useless piece of gut that fills up with detritus up to the point where it can burst, with lethal effect. How about having a single tube in your throat for both air and food? A handful of people choke to death every year from what's simply bad design. The spine is a great, flexible bit of gear for horizontal animals like dogs or horses, but for vertical animals like humans, it resembles standing a bicycle chain on end, forever straining the muscles that keep it that way. Unless you die young, at some point in your life you'll experience backache. Why have we only got one heart (apart from Dr. Who and Mr. Spock, but they're not humans)? Such a critical device should surely have backup.

Along these lines, do our modern day creationists have an answer to the Omphaloidean Heresy?

This was the question as to whether Adam had a navel and it was a heresy to even think about it let alone come up with an answer. If Adam had a navel, it would mean that God created him and the Earth as though it had pre-existed (e.g. trees with rings from seasons that had never been). In which case, since the Earth appears in so many ways to be about 5 billion years old, then any theologians who try to claim it's a mere 4000 and any evodence that it's otherwise is flawed, then they're criticising God's handiwork, which makes them heretics.
OTOH if Adam didn't have a navel, then he was arguably not truly human and so Original Sin can scarcely have been transmitted from him to us, a different species.

posted by Les the Spaceman @ 6:11 pm