by the Way . . .

Anyone who remembers the three Sis Moles singing Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah along with Uncle Remus has to have doubts about this being a product of pure chance, i.e., evolution. Could the Sis Mole (and every other plant and animal, of course, but there is something especially miraculous about a singing mole) have been designed by visiting aliens? This blog never expresses an opinion on sensitive matters, but I recently dug up some challenging arguments pro and con. Let's do the con first, as it requires some historical theological digging. Remember, this blog always seeks to expand your horizons.

It is not generally known that around the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a serious dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Not that stink about who invented calculus. This was serious. Their studies of gravity and the planets in their courses had led to disparate views as to just how God was running the show. They agreed that HE created the system and set it in motion, but Isaac had intimated in his Opticks that God kept a hand in, tinkering from time to time to make sure it worked. This shocked Willy, to whom the tinkering suggestion implied that God lacked the foresight to make the system perfect, such that it would run on forever by itself. Isaac argued that to hypothesize that God set something up that would run on forever without HIM was to make HIM irrelevant. Willy didn't like the implication that God could make a mistake, or change HIS mind.

You will already have seen that this was just a 300 hundred year old version of the current dispute about evolution. No one should have a problem with the idea that God set up the whole thing; the question is whether he tinkers, or designs, as things go along. Admittedly, the terminology is a little different. Back then you didn't go around suggesting that aliens, or time travelers for that matter, designed things. The alien thing would certainly get you hung and cut down alive for some additional gruesome goings on. Time travel? Back then, Stephen Hawking wouldn't stand a chance. You know what happened to witches.

You can also see that, in this more enlightened age, this is both an argument for and against the alien theory. On the one hand, an alien could make a mistake that would require tinkering, but on the other hand, an alien wouldn't be around later to tinker, or would he? Some people think cats are aliens, but Sis Moles don't get on with them. Anyway, you can see that this is a very confusing situation, accounting for the various views we see today. Polls tell us that only 40% of Americans believe in evolution.

Which leads us to look at the design mistake issue from a different angle. The National Science Foundation surveys also reveal that one-fifth of Americans think the sun goes around the earth. Sorry Nick, but things sink in slow. Also, only about half the folks know that humans didn't live at the same time as the dinosaurs. So however good the designer was with Sis Moles, the intelligence designed into humans might be taken as evidence that you shouldn't try to do everything in six days.