The Language of Design

by Suzanne Poor

Just as the controversy continues to rage over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays — Will himself, Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), Christopher Marlowe or a combination of folk, so does the worry over who created heaven and earth. Creationists think it was the wrathful God of Genesis who completed the task in just six days. Evolutionists are certain the incredible design was by chance. And now the Intelligent Design contingent is attempting to convince the world that a single entity planned the whole thing over the last 13 million years or so.

We have the plays; we have the land and the creatures that inhabit it. We have scientific, fossilized evidence of planet Earth’s mutating, changing living things. And we have faith-based organizations such as the Discovery Institute that offer philosophical panegyrics extolling an entity they cannot identify or describe.

All that to say, there’s a new language associated with this dispute. Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, describes the Discovery Institute as “the Seattle-based think tank that has almost single handedly put intelligent design on the map. The threat to science and reason,” he says, “comes less from the fundamentalists than from sophisticated branding experts and polemical Ph.D.’s, clever enough to refrain from referring to God or even the Creator.”

Media pundits quote each other
William Safire quotes Professor Leonard Krishtalka of the University of Kansas, who defines the I.D movement as “nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” Alter also used this quote a week earlier. Later the professor added: “It’s a sophisticated camouflage of Genesis-driven creationism. Intelligent design sounds scientific and they couch it as a science instead of religion. Safire calls it Neo-creo, pointing out that the media scorn ‘piles on’ — from the liberal Alter to Time magazine’s conservative Charles Krauthammer, who denounces ‘this tarted-up version of creationism.’”

Whether intelligent design is a branding coup, a ploy to pump up faith-based thinking and acting, or a legitimate argument, the fact remains that planet Earth was formed out of a void, that in the very beginning certain elements collided by chance and formed a creature that ultimately left its watery home and walked on land. There is concrete evidence — fossils, DNA, genomes and genes, even the simple process of dissecting a chick embryo — that there is an evolutionary process. It’s clear too that the design itself is awesome, but as Daniel C. Dennett writes in The New York Times, “The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.” He also points out that the intelligent design forces haven’t yet tried to explain anything. They’re not even sure whether the design began at the outset of Earth’s existence or whether it is a constant continuum.

Everybody quotes everybody else
“Einstein,” says Safire, quoting his colleague Dennis Overbye, “believed there was order in the universe but that it had not been designed for us.” Again quoting Overby, Safire said that Einstein noted, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”

Not so Seattle, a leader of Puget Sound Indians of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, who uttered these thoughts about his earth in 1855 as he expressed not just a faith but a deep awareness of Earth’s mysteries. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony and man all belong to the same family . . . . Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth, befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood, which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it ...”

Does it matter who or what caused life to form, change, adapt and produce the intelligent beings called human? Does it matter in the end who wrote the plays and the sonnets? What matters is that we are here, we think and we discover, always in amazement, just how our earth works, often in wondrous ways.

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