Intelligent Design? No intelligence found.

I was having a wander through the welsh news (Granny Dragon was Welsh so I take a bit of an interest) and I see the Tories are frantically trying to spin the comments of one of their more rabid Christian candidates that being a fan of musical theatre is a sin.

He is, of course, absolutely right. Homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. If you read the bible and truly believe that this collection of middle eastern rants and fairy tales is the true and inerrant word of the big beardy bloke in the sky then that is the only conclusion you can come to. Oh and you had better ditch the cheeseburgers and bacon sandwiches, stone your children to death if they are disrespectful and isolate your wife from you when she's having her period as he doesn't like that stuff either.

Alternatively you could actually use the couple of kilos of grey matter in your head, think for yourself and join the rest of us in the twenty first century. We have this neat thing which is called "The Scientific Method" which explains things.

Ah I see you've heard of this and you've come up with this thing called "Intelligent Design"... yes you've heard of the scientific method but you haven't really understood it have you. {Patronising sorrow mode = ON}Ah my son, you are in error.

In case you've been living under a rock the past few years "Intelligent Design" is the latest way the fundy Xtians have come up with of selling creationism, basically "God made everything" and usually by stating that there is no way that something so clever as, say, the eye, could have arisen by chance so there must be some "Intelligence" driving it - and that intelligence is of course our middle-eastern sky god. Of course as soon as you put God into the equation there is no way you can ever disprove this theory so it basically falls at the first hurdle of science but I'll indulge you for a while...

OK so let's take a look at the eye. Yes it's a pretty useful thing, lets me see my 'pooter so I can type this and stereoscopic vision makes it really easy to correctly target you for being breathed on. But it isn't the best design in the world is it, it performs quite poorly in low-light conditions compared to the eyes of other species like cats and it has a fundamental design flaw in it - the fovea or "blind spot" which is necessitated by a bigger fundamental design flaw in that light has to pass through the nerves connected to the light sensing cells before it gets to those cells. Oh and there's that common colour blindness fault as well which makes about 6% of the units defective. Now I design things for a living, computer systems as it happens, and if I built something that basically worked but had major design faults and actually returned erroneous data 6% of the time I would lose my job! Now these faults don't exist in some species like the squid where the nerves are the right way round so there's no blind spot. So, unless god happens to be Cthulu, how come the squid has got a "better" eye than we, made in his own image, have?

And if you happen to look around you'll find all sorts of light sensing organs, from simple surface rows of cells that can merely sense the presence of light to basic motion sensing organs with low resolution, insect compound eyes to the relative sophistication of mammalian and avian vision systems (and squid of course). There has been plenty of opportunity for natural processes to evolve the various forms of eye we come across. But of course you believe that the world was farted out of god's arse 6000 years ago, all those fossils were planted there as a test of faith, god mucks about with the laws of physics every time someone performs a carbon dating test and the Grand Canyon was created after one particularly wet weekend.

Now it's scary enough that you believe this shit but now you want to teach it to our kids? Now I would normally be in favour of introducing private money into the education system but not when it allows rich but stupid people to force this utter bollocks on children. We need to be able to teach kids to properly think first, give them a thorough grounding in the application of the scientific method and how to construct a logical argument (and how to spot logical fallacies and tricks) before letting them loose on bollocks like ID.

Trust me people, we have to be on our guard, especially if the Boy Dave gets in next time as he's going to be pushing for a lot more "faith based" service provision. You would not want a school to be pushing lies like "heroin - it won't kill you" to your kids would you? I'd posit that teaching your kids "intelligent design" is just, if not more, harmful.

Oh and I see that there is a "Welsh Christian Party" standing for election too. Their primary aim seems to be removing the "devilish" red dragon from the flag.

Listen matey, you muck about with y ddraig goch me and all my fire-breathing friend will be be taking a short, hot trip to your chapels.

There's lovely.