Life. Accident or intelligent design?

Life. Accident or intelligent design?1

Who’s intelligence? God’s? The cells in our very bodies that adapt and change us to adapt? Mother Nature’s, that loving lady who gave us all survival of the fittest? What IS accident? Who’s to say that chaos isn’t its own intelligence? If the diverse collection of cells in our body come together to create a fully functional human being(for a given measure of functional), why can’t random occurrences around the world truly come together to create Chaos as a being itself, that has its own intelligence and idea of how things should work?2

Let us say life is an accident. The basic life, the basic thing that separates a living cell from an unliving molecule. Let us say that life is a chemical factory and the right mix of chemicals happened to come together to create something that controls its own extent of existence. That itself raises interesting questions – what is life? If you put a live frog into a blender and set it on puree and then left the parts there for a million years, would you get a frog back, despite having every single component necessary for the making of a frog? If you took that frog puree, and rearranged it molecule by molecule, in the exact configuration the frog it was before it got blended, would you get a croaking frog back? What exactly is it that separates a corpse from a living body?3

Is it the same thing that separates a toy with batteries from a toy without batteries? Some kind of energy that the body constantly recreates from food, air, water, etc.? Let’s say that it is. Let’s not bring any idea of a soul into things for a second and assumed that a human body is a collection of cells that take in resources from the outside to create a continual supply of energy that allows the body to do what it does, be it move from A to B or just take a refreshing swim out in the C. That once upon a time, a bunch of random chemicals got together and created something that can control its own existence, and reproduce, converting matter and energy around it to create more of itself. Assuming that that is how life began, how did it become something more complicated? More randomness? It fiddled around with itself until it became something more complicated? Or more random chemicals mutated the single cell organism into a multi celled one? Break from serious rant, it’s fun doing this when you’ve watched the movie ‘Evolution’ the previous night. It’s a GOOD movie.4

Back to business.5

So. Randomness brings out a single celled organism. Then more randomness turns that single cell into a multi-celled being. More mutations brought about by the environment, and bim bam boom, we’ve got survival of the fittest, Darwin’s theory down to a t. The ones that live are the ones that reproduce, and enough mutations create a race of human being who goes on to inherit the earth(not considering the theories of super intelligent talking mice).
So what does this establish? Life by accident is not impossible. Especially considering an infinite universe, and assuming that to create life you need just the right mix of the right chemicals and energy, it was bound to have happened eventually.
But what’s our basic assumption here? That life is just the right mix of chemicals and energy. That life is creatable. That if scientists got smart enough, they could make life out of unlife easily, hell, even bring the dead back to life. As far as I know, scientists haven’t managed that yet, so that still leaves things pretty much up in the air. And, even if they have, it doesn’t prove anything – just because life could have happened by accident doesn’t mean it did. 6

Alright, flipside! Now we’re assuming that life can’t come out of nowhere. That it is a force. That every living thing has a spirit inside it, and once that spirit’s gone, well, that’s all there is to it – it passes on, or fades out, or becomes a ghost, or goes to any amount of afterlives, who knows what they are? The point is that the spirit is its own force, and it cannot be created, or concocted, or mixed up together. It is what it is, and there’s nothing you can do it change it. Note, it is spirit, to be differentiated from intelligence. In order for this assumption to work, it has to apply to all living things, be they gorillas, plants, amoeba or Britney Spears. And let’s assume that God’s in charge of things(any God, take your pick. I’m going with God the god. It could be Mommy Nature, or even Chaos if any you got that idea I was going with earlier. Just basically a Higher Being). Alright. Also, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume evolution(and to answer the question, yes, sure, God could have just started out with humans and gave them the earth instead starting with the whole process of single celled organisms, but he decided to give life free will(and if you don’t believe in free will at all then truly, there is no such thing as intelligence and thus no such thing as intelligent design and the argument ends right here) which means that he had to start small to figure things out, because in order for a living being to truly have free will, it must be able to make its own choices that aren’t god’s choices which means that, essentially, there are things that God doesn’t necessarily know. He just knows us in the same way your best friend knows what flavor of ice cream you’re likely to pick. Um. Assume evolution AND God, okay?).7

Oh. Um. Bugger. I think that I’ve said everything I wanted to about this in that bracket. Essentially that, assuming God and evolution, intelligent design could have worked out. Heck, even just assuming God intelligent design could work out. But since there is evidence for evolution, we’re going with the God AND evolution assumption combo. So things evolved being guided by a master hand, helping organisms adapt to their environment, instead of them being randomly mutated to the next level.8

And what does THAT establish? That yeah, intelligent design isn’t possible, assuming God exists. So who’s right? The advocates of intelligent design or accident? I believe Socrates is right. Why? Because he said that the only thing a person can truly know is that he knows nothing. Following on that, I believe that anything you ‘know’ is simply that which you choose to believe. Meaning it’s all faith. I believe God exists. But that’s a different argument altogether.9


I know that I KNOW nothing, after this rant. But I know that very, very definitely.
The, um, End.