As I was driving last night, I was uncharacteristically searching through the radio channels. Typically I just listen to the same couple of stations but I wanted to find WTOP. I stopped to listen when I came across the start of a segment called something like, "The Science of Creation" and braced myself for the worst.
The narrator was making an argument from design concerning the seasons of the year, the calendar, and time. The argument was that the 24 hour time period of the day is ideally suited to human beings. You see, we need to sleep; isn't it convenient how it gets dark at night? The 23 degree tilt of the Earth is perfect as well for giving us varied seasons (so we can enjoy varied foilage, I guess). One of his main points was that the 365 day year was clearly a number indicative of careful thought. All of this, of course, couldn't happen "by random chance" and so is evidence of design by God. Plus, we get our six day work week directly from God!
Of course, anyone with half a brain will see major problems with this argument. First, none of these numbers is particularly perfect for anything. 24 hours? If designed, why not 20 or 25 hours? Why 365 days of the year rather than 400? Why a seven day week rather than 10? And what about people who have to work every day of the week? All of these seem arbitrary if a product of design. For that matter, why any tilt of the Earth at all? Do we actually need seasons? Many people have survived along the equator with virtually no changes in seasons.
More bizarrely, when discussing the length of the year, the narrator talks about how a year is actually 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9.7676 seconds (sidereal). He even discusses how we have to adjust our calendars every four years by inserting a leap day. And somehow, this is more evidence of how perfectly everything is designed. Huh?
There's an obvious and simple answer to this nonsense. The Earth was not designed to accommodate us. We are suited to a 24 hour day because we evolved here on Earth. We are suited to the climate of the Earth because we evolved within that climate. If the conditions of Earth were different, we would be different, perhaps radically so. If our orbit around the sun was different, if the rotational speed of the Earth was different, perhaps we wouldn't have evolved at all. But the conditions of the Earth are what they are and we evolved to live under those conditions. In a puddle, the hole doesn't conform to the shape of the water. The water fills the shape of the hole. It's pretty simple really. (Hint for the slow: In the preceding analogy, human beings are the water.)
I think I'll stick to my regular stations from now on. There's too much of "teh stupid" out there.
4 comments:
The narrator’s name wasn’t Pangloss, was it?
I didn't catch the name. Whoever it was was smarmy, stupid, bad at organizing an essay, and knew nothing about actual science. I got the impression it was a regular segment.
Oh, I get it. Pangloss. As in Voltaire. :-)
It reminds me of how when there is a close play in a baseball game, commentators will talk about how the dimensions on a baseball field (ie, 90 feet between bases and 60 ft from mound to the plate) are perfectly designed for the game. Of course, this is a stupid argument because if the bases were 95 feet apart, you would still have close plays and the reason it seems perfect is that players have adapted to those particular dimensions. Of course, we know that God created baseball and handed down those dimensions along with the Ten Commandments.
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