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by Illuminatus Maximus
New Dawn 97
July-August 2006
from
NewDawnMagazine Website
Spanish
version
Children in Ohio
may be taught life was created by aliens
under an
education package designed to
ditch Darwin's Theory of evolution.
The US state is considering adopting
the "intelligent design" theory
that life is too complex to have simply evolved,
as the Darwin
Theory suggests.
Therefore says the package,
life must have been
designed
by some supernatural being,
maybe 'God,' maybe aliens.
Herald Sun
Columbus, Ohio, March 2002
Intelligent Design (ID) theory is a highly speculative philosophical
argument, popular in recent years, which holds that rich diversity
of species on the planet Earth is best understood as evidence of
divine (or alien) intervention in terrestrial life.
In a nutshell, ID argues that the Earth is too young, and life too
complex for fish, animals and birds to have evolved through natural
selection; instead, we must look for a supernatural cause.
Professional scientists object to ID theory on the grounds that it
can't be proven, and so falls outside the domain of science; ID
proponents have responded by taking their case directly to the
public with a political campaign called "teach the controversy."
The "teach the controversy" campaign makes scientists (especially
those who depend on public funding) nervous, and with good reason:
the ultimate goal of the ID movement, as leading spokesmen frankly
admit, is to discard the scientific method altogether and "win back"
Western culture for the Biblical creator god.
What makes this situation so especially interesting is the fact that
leading ID theorists have positioned themselves as intellectual
"heretics" struggling against the gatekeepers of scientific
"orthodoxy."
Of course, the idea that ID could actually be taught alongside
evolution in public schools has provoked an unprecedented tsunami of
scorn from these same, self-appointed gatekeepers.
"ID isn't
science!" they object. "If we teach ID, then why not teach students
that the Moon is made out of green cheese, or that storks
deliver babies?"
I would like to respectfully suggest that children's stories like
the ones I've just mentioned aren't the best analogies for ID
theory.
A better example might be the
Anthropic Principle (AP), a
closely related line of speculative reasoning which holds that the
Universe itself is so complex and so improbable that it, too,
requires special explanation.
(We might also note that evangelical
christians are especially fond of AP in its "strong" form, which
suggests that our Universe was "fine-tuned" for life by a god-like
being.)
Unfortunately for christian culture warriors, neither of these
remarkable notions ultimately supports the old-fashioned idea that
life, the Universe and everything represent the singular creations
of a perfect, rational Supreme being.
(In its totalizing
singularity, the Genesis meta-narrative differs little from the
Big
Bang and
Darwinian evolution scenarios which comprise the
"origins
story" of the industrialized West).
Rather, ID theory and the Anthropic Principle - and especially their
corollary mechanisms panspermia and simulation - seem to reveal the
handiwork of multiple, incompetent creators who were themselves
created by yet more incompetent creators in another Universe, and so
on, extending backwards in time and space to a point of infinite
regress.
To put it bluntly:
AP and ID do not somehow
"prove" the case for the
Bible; instead, they unavoidably and inevitably lead us back to a
time and place even earlier and more primal than Genesis itself,
back to the myths and theological speculations of the ancient
Gnostic christians.
GNOSTICISM - A QUICK INTRODUCTION
What historians today call "Gnosticism" was once a broad and diverse
movement within pre-catholic christianity,
an anarchic assemblage
of hundreds of different schools of mystical theology whose
adherents proudly produced reams of elaborate, florid, and highly
speculative re-interpretations of Biblical scripture.
While no one doctrine united all Gnostic
christians, they did hold
certain beliefs in common.
Perhaps the most shocking of these was
the idea that the Old Testament creator
god Yahweh was actually the
Demiurge, a monstrous deity born from the shadow of infinity who
fled the divine world to build our Universe in a misbegotten
experiment.
This Demiurge, the story goes, created for himself assistants - bumbling fallen angels called
"Archons"
- and these in turn created
the Earth, humanity, and seven heavens which encase and enclose our
planet like so many cosmic prison walls.
In a version of the myth popularized by 2nd century Gnostic
theologian
Basilides, the archons generated not just seven, but 365
heavenly realms in sequence, nested one inside the other like the
rings of an electron - each successive layer just slightly more
defective than the one which produced and preceded it, and all
populated by arrogant creator gods completely unaware of those who
came before them.
French heresy-hunter St.
Irenaeus invokes these strange stories in
an attempt to refute the idea there is another heaven above heaven,
and another god above "God", for if gods produce gods who create
heavens filled with yet more world-creating gods, then where does it
all stop?
…by that very process of reasoning on which they [Gnostic
christians] depend for teaching that there is a… 'God' above the
Creator of heaven and earth, any one who chooses to employ it may
maintain that there is another [heaven] above [heaven and] above
that again another… flowing out into… worlds without limits, and
gods that cannot be numbered… so that the formation of heavens of
this kind can never cease… the operation must go on ad infinitum…1
The Gnostic version of the
Adam and Eve myth also differs radically
from the Biblical one, presenting the Garden of Eden as a shabby
laboratory where the "archons" built Adam from blurry blueprints,
botching his brain and body almost beyond repair:
The (first) human
being… was a creation of angels [but was] unable to stand erect
because of the angels' impotence, and rather writhed on the
ground like a worm…2
Even after the Eden fiasco, the archons continued to tamper with the
human gene pool, raping Eve, drowning Adam's descendants in a flood,
and descending to the Earth to impregnate the survivors with
half-human hybrids.
As we shall see, the ID and AP theories so beloved of contemporary
apologists have far more in common with the open, flawed and
multiple processes described here than with anything even remotely
resembling the Biblical creation account, or, as one Gnostic scribe
observed waggishly:
For Adam was a laughingstock, since he was made a counterfeit type
of man by the Rulers.3
ID THEORY MADE SIMPLE
The basic idea behind ID is that life and its component parts
display something called "irreducible complexity."
This means that
living systems (plants, animals, people) are so complicated that
they could not possibly have arrived at their present forms through
evolution - instead, new species must have been deliberately planned
and introduced to the planet by some sort of godlike being.
Inanimate objects such as televisions, microwave ovens or
wristwatches illustrate this principle. If we can admit that these
devices show evidence of planning and design, and are unlikely to
have emerged from chance alone, then shouldn't we admit the same of
the human eye?
Like the watch, the eye seems so perfectly engineered that it's
difficult to imagine how it could have evolved in stages over time.
Remove any one of its parts, ID theorists point out, and it would
dim, blur, or even become completely useless.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this line of reasoning,
at least from the Biblical perspective.
For one thing, if organs and
species are so complex that they require an "intelligent designer,"
then,
wouldn't this "designer," too, be at least as complex as its
creations, and so require a designer of its own?
And wouldn't that
intelligent designer also require a designer, and so too its
designer, ad infinitum...?
UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN
A second problem with the "eye" example is the fact that the human
retina tends to detach from the optic nerve over time, leading to
blindness; if this is evidence of "Intelligent Design," then our "Intelligent Designer" is clumsy at best and malicious at worst.
Other widely remarked-upon flaws 4 in the design of the human body
include:
-
high placement of the larynx, facilitating choking
-
thin spinal discs between the vertebrae which degenerate under
pressure, causing crippling back pain
-
a small pelvis makes childbirth difficult and often fatal for women
-
a weak, vulnerable stomach unprotected by ribs
Of course, evidence of sub-optimal design in itself does not prove
that "Intelligent Design" did not occur; it may instead demonstrate
the purposeful engineering of planned obsolescence.
Or it may be that these seeming flaws are part of the Intelligent
Designer's secret plan to give humans the opportunity to improve
themselves. Consider the German artist Gunther von Hagens' plan to
build a "super-human" using the donated body parts of terminally ill
patients.
Why and how...?
The program aims to identify and correct the significant design
flaws in human anatomy. The body will be modified by Professor von Hagens and leading biologists, surgeons and mechanical engineers
into an "improved" human form.
Ideas already put forward include:
-
increase the number of ribs to protect internal organs better
-
create backward-bending knees to lessen wear on joints
-
rearrange the trachea and
esophagus to stop food going down the
windpipe by mistake
-
double heart or reconstruction of the coronary arteries
-
make a retractable penis
Professor von Hagens claims that his
Protean monster will,
"pave the
way for a more healthy, capable and longer-living body. What we do
with a real human body today will show what we can achieve in the
future using genetic engineering." 5
MULTIPLE DESIGNERS THEORY
Von Hagens' team of assistants illustrate another unstated premise
of popular ID theory, to wit:
why do ID proponents always seem to
assume there was only one designer?
If evolution fails as an explanation for the rich diversity of
species on the planet Earth, then why not posit a rich diversity of
designers?
Science writer Richard Hoppe finds such a scenario not only possible
but likely, noting that:
…Some of the most impressive and elaborate designs in biology appear
to have as their primary purpose the defeat or subversion of other
designs.
Designs engage in various kinds of biological arms races
with one another.
Some examples are:
Each of these is an example of design pitted against design,
directly implicating multiple designers. 6
In fact, scientists have long known that the human body hosts a wide
variety of foreign flora and fauna.
As a recent Wired news story
entitled "People are Human-Bacteria Hybrid" notes:
We are best viewed as
walking "superorganisms," highly complex
conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses…
More
than 500
different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making
up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only
some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by
the aliens.
It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from
bacteria, too. 7
"Which came
first, the intestine or the tapeworm?" W.S. Burroughs
once asked.
If Hoppe's "Multiple Intelligent Designers" theory is correct, the
tapeworm, the intestine, mitochondria, bacteria, fungi and perhaps
even the human brain and body were produced by completely separate
beings - limited and imperfect creators with varying levels of skill
competing against one another for ecological dominance.
ALIENS AMONG US
ID theory continues to excite evangelical christians, but there are
even more signs that their enthusiasm may be misplaced, and for
reasons much more serious than built-in flaws or design by
committee.
In short,
if they accept this "Intelligent Designer," then what
guarantee do they have that it (or they) will be gods at all?
Leading ID theorist Bill Dembski (of Baylor University) isn't
exactly sure.
According to a recent article in the
American
Spectator:
The intelligent design that Dembski hopes to detect could belong
either to a Biblical God or to an earlier race of Martians who
planted us here (like in the movie Mission to Mars).
The idea that the Earth was,
deliberately "seeded" with life by
extraterrestrial scientists "may seem pretty far out," the article
concedes.
"But Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his
co-discovery of DNA's structure, is one of a number of scientists
who have seriously promoted the 'panspermia hypothesis'…" 8
The ancient Gnostics were vitalists, holding that all life springs
from a single, unseen animating principle; the Gnostic teacher
Basilides referred to this original life source as the
"universal
seed," or "panspermia."
Today, scientists use the term "panspermia" to describe the theory
that life is not native to the Earth, but was instead brought here
by an alien spore or virus.
Part of the appeal of this idea lies in
the fact it doesn't try to answer how life first emerged from
non-living matter. Given our vast - perhaps infinite - Universe, the
most likely scenario is that life first emerged somewhere else and
then "infected" our relatively youthful planet only recently.
Numerous vehicles for this "infection" have been proposed, from
meteorites and sunbeams to interstellar clouds; perhaps the most
distasteful was suggested by Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who
famously wondered if the Earth life began,
when our planet was
contaminated with microbes from the discarded remnants of an
extraterrestrial picnic...!
CRICK'S CLONES
Francis Crick agreed with the basic premise of
panspermia - the idea
that the Earth was probably "infected" with life - but wondered at
the mechanism.
Wasn't the passive spread of life from planet to
planet by natural, accidental causes almost as unlikely as abiogenesis (the spontaneous production of life from non-living
matter - the conventional scientific explanation)?
Isn't it much more likely that an extraterrestrial
civilization
seeded our planet with life deliberately?
Terming his model Directed Panspermia, Crick suggested that,
a "spaceship" carrying
"large samples of… microorganisms" was sent to
the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilization
- either as an experiment, preparation for colonization or a genetic
Noah's Ark of some sort. 9
Or, as Fortean researchers
Alan and Sally Landsburg put it:
The DNA molecule is a marvel of
microminiaturization.
All of the DNA in
every cell of every living creature on Earth could be packed
into one container no bigger than a pea. Thus it could be
possible to ship to distant planets the distilled essence of
entire colonies, stored in tiny packets.
The DNA molecules
need be activated only at the appropriate moment, thereby
providing enormous savings both in shipping weight and in cost. 10
Sir Frederick Hoyle (the British astronomer who coined the term
"Big
Bang") and his student Chandra Wickramasinghe have proposed an even
stranger version of the Directed Panspermia model.
In the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe
view, life originated with (and continues to evolve from) showers of
viruses from outer space:
…life on Earth is
derived from what appears to be an all pervasive galaxy-wide
living system.
Terrestrial life had
its origins in the gas and dust clouds of space, which later
became incorporated in and amplified within comets. Life was
derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the
Earth…11
What makes the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe model so remarkable is that it
seeks to replace random genetic variation as a primary evolutionary
mechanism.
According to Wickramasinghe,
"every crucial new
inheritable property" that occurs in the animal kingdom "must have
an external cosmic origin."
"Viruses, although
often bad for the individual, are in the view of Sir Fred Hoyle
and myself of paramount importance to the evolution for species
on our planet.
They carry with them
the store of cosmic genetic information needed for the
generation of new species, classes and orders, and for the
progressive forward march of life…12
"If the Earth were
sealed off from all sources of external genes: bugs could
replicate till doomsday," Wickramasinghe writes, "but
they would still only be bugs: and monkey colonies would also
reproduce but only to produce more monkeys.
The Earth would be a
dull place indeed…" 13
In other words, not only did aliens first infect the Earth with
life, but they also make evolution possible by supplying terrestrial
species with new genetic material for natural selection to act upon!
Sir Hoyle didn't believe that these viruses fell by chance.
Instead
life itself was the result of an alien experiment:
The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one
to a number with 40,000 naughts after it… It is big enough to bury
Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.
There was no primeval
soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the
beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have
been the product of purposeful intelligence. 14
Sir Hoyle seems to have betrayed at least some misgivings about the
implications of these ideas, warning in a 1971 press conference
that:
Human beings are
simply pawns in the game of alien minds that control our
every move. They are everywhere, in the sky, on the sea, and in
the Earth…
It is not an alien
intelligence from another planet. It is actually from another
Universe which entered ours at the very beginning and has been
controlling all that has happened since…15
CAVEATS AND PARADOXES
For all its strengths, the panspermia hypothesis still does not
actually tell us how or where life first arose, instead shuffling
this question off to a distant realm of mystery and paradox into
which we cannot hope to peer.
As one christian critic wonders:
..If for the sake of argument we grant that life on Earth was seeded
by ancient extraterrestrials, then the obvious question is, who or
what created our extraterrestrial creators?
Some would argue that
they were, in turn sprinkled (created) by an even more ancient race
of ET's.
Well, where did they come from? An infinite regression back
in time of "alien sprinklings"…[?] 16
Since ID doesn't distinguish between gods and extraterrestrials, and
the activities of gods are by definition something that can't be
tested or measured, we have only a few, very limited avenues of
inquiry left.
Perhaps human beings were designed by multiple, incompetent creator
gods (or one expert mischievously posing as a family of blunderers)
- but if so, human beings will never be able to verify this
supernatural creator(s) existence.
Sadly, the metaphysical status of ghosts, spirits, gods and other
supernatural beings means that these will always be compelled to
hover just beyond the explanatory grasp of human science.
On the other hand, researchers still can't produce any evidence for
the existence of (presumably physical and biological)
extraterrestrial entities despite over 50 years of investigation.
So until they do, the only way we can even hope to learn whether panspermia (and thus ID) might explain our own existence is by
attempting to replicate the experiment ourselves.
To wit:
if human scientists ever succeed (either deliberately or
accidentally) in "infecting" another planet with terrestrial
bacteria or viruses, or in genetically engineering an entirely new
species and introducing it to the wild, then ID will stand validated
and our own role and history on this planet will suddenly come into
sharp focus.
Or, as researcher
Zecharia Sitchin once put it:
I feel that just as
they (extraterrestrials) came to Earth and created us through
genetic engineering, and mixed their genes with those of
Ape-woman, that one day we will go out in space and land on
another planet somewhere and do the same thing.
In this sense, I
believe things are ordained in a grand pattern…17
Footnotes
-
-
Satorninos,
according to St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, from
Bentley Layton's The Gnostic Scriptures, pp. 161-62, 1987
-
-
-
Professor Gunther Von Hagens'
Body Worlds, London Press Release, March 2, 2003
-
-
-
-
Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L.
E. "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in
David Darling's Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and
Spaceflight
-
Alan and
Sally Landsburg, The Outer Space Connection, p.17, 1975
-
Chandra Wickramasinghe,
testimony in McLean v Arkansas Board of Education, 1981,
www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
Latter-day beatniks might also note that an extremely
similar theory is advanced in the seminal William S.
Burroughs science fiction tale,
The Soft Machine
-
-
Sir
Frederick Hoyle, 1971 news conference.
-
Missler &
Eastman, Alien Encounters, p.141.
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