A perfectly designed picture?

I was talking to a man some months ago who said he couldn’t stomach the notion of Intelligent Design, because to him it was just a clever name for Creationism, and as a Marxist he didn’t believe in Creationism because that would mean that there was a God, and, he said, ‘I can’t believe that there is a God’.

I remembered that conversation because of two North American news stories I read this week, two stories about homosexuality. The first story was that two Canadian Mounties (do you remember that TV series, Due South, about the men in red, policemen who used horses rather than cars?) are getting married; the second story was of a high court ruling in New York that upheld a ban against gay marriages in that part of the USA. I have already written in this column that I consider homosexuality to be a design fault and that championing same-sex marriages on the basis of ‘human rights’ is a madness that fails to comprehend exactly what ‘human’ actually is.

I have always championed the notion of Intelligent Design, simply because it makes sense to me and the classical theories of Darwin himself and the Neo-Darwinist arguments of scientists such as Dawkins don’t—at least not in the final analysis.

But if ID is spoken of by scientists at all it is still with caution and more often in hushed tones behind closed doors. That is because the scientific world thought it had won the creation versus evolution debate conclusively in well-publicised cases in 1860 and 1925 (the so-called Monkey Trial). Consequently, the National Academy of Science has recently condemned the notion of Intelligent Design, although its proponents have not actually said that ID is a template for belief in a God.

Anyway, if Darwinism can be updated because our science has progressed, why can’t we update the design theory as well?

Michael Behe, a molecular biologist, argues that living systems always reduce to an irreducible complexity that cannot be explained by old or new theories of evolution. ‘Well, think of it this way,’ he says. ‘If you take away a rock from a pile of rocks you haven't changed much. It's still a heap of rocks - just a rock or two smaller. But take away a component from the mousetrap and it isn't a mousetrap any more.’ Evolutionary theory can’t account for a mousetrap, because complexity of that sort has to have been designed at once, not bit-by-bit over a long period of time as evolutionary theory would have to argue. There would be no purpose in evolving a part of a mousetrap, because the thing wouldn’t be able to work.

For me, homosexuality also makes no sense because man-man and woman-woman doesn’t work either. It’s not a question of love or caring or companionship—these are all different (even if related) concerns—but of design: male and female are designed as complementary beings: they belong together and make no sense when apart. It is only together that male and female can make another human. In fact, as I’ve said before, I believe that only a man plus a woman can make any kind of a full human, that is, full humanity can only be seen when the unique and different male and female energies and qualities come together. I don’t think of mousetraps but of jigsaws, and neither Adam and Steve or Anna and Eve can fit seamlessly together to make a perfectly designed picture—but Adam and Eve can, and so can Steve and Anna.