09.10.08
“Intelligent Design or Darwinism, it makes no difference either way”
Science can’t save us from black hole of our irrelevance
All my life, science has been on the verge of the ‘breakthrough’ which will explain the origins of the universe. Today presents us with yet another mighty threshold, as the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border begins the search for the elusive, and so far hypothetical, particle known as the “Higgs boson”. This is supposed to be the key to existence, but never fear: once scientists have found this particular boson — named after the great Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose — they’ll find some other even more elusive particle to go chasing after. Meanwhile, another band of well-funded lunatics is looking for the origins of the universe beyond the outer reaches of space.
It’s all meaningless. The more doors we open, the greater the hall of darkness beyond; the more numerous the ensuing questions. Only a preposterous vanity can explain why men continuously think that we are close to discovering the ‘truth’ about existence, when we have no idea why or how, on this planet alone, there are probably some 30 million distinct species of insects, and perhaps 400 million different kinds of bacteria — and that is before we gaze upwards, at the billions and billions of stars.
Every child who has heard about the Big Bang theory has asked what existed before the Big Bang, and how, and where and why. There is no non-magical answer to any of these wise, childish questions. Compared to the vast scale of the universe and all the things we know it contains, from black holes to the quasars, quarks and boses, we actually don’t even have the ratiocinative talents of a halibut — for that doughty fish never presumes to think that it is going to be able to understand the universe. And only a halibut with Alzheimer’s entertains the delusion that the key to existence is discoverable by its little halibut brain — and it is now in a halibut home, wearing nappies.
Intelligent Design or Darwinism, it makes no difference either way. Both, in their own fashion, are absurd intellectual pretensions — for they presume to explain existence. Intelligent design believes in an almighty God who — in all his goodness — created numerous imperfect species, which then had to go through the abominable process of the weakest and the genetically flawed suffering terrible deaths, until finally today’s extant species emerged. What a delightful deity. And omniscient Darwinism cannot explain how proteins came into existence.