A lad of ten when I lost my mother, I am left with not nearly
enough memories. But I’ll never forget the time she pulled a fast
one on me, asking: “What’s the difference between an elephant and a
mailbox?” I couldn’t guess at the punch line, so I just said that I
didn’t know. “In that case,” she concluded. “I had better not give
you this letter to mail.”
In this vein, I approach the issue of random evolution vs.
designed development as more than a judgment call one way or the
other. It is not enough to say that design is a more likely
scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. It
strikes me as urgent to insist that you not allow your mind to
surrender the absolute clarity that all complex and magnificent
things were made that way. Once you allow the intellect to consider
that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic
interactive components can be an accident, you are in a menagerie
of bizarrerie; you have essentially “lost your mind” as a tool that
operates and defines within recognizable parameters; you can no
longer reasonably distinguish between an elephant and a
mailbox.
Putting aside the systemic flaws in the process of random
evolution, I would like to take a moment to examine all the things
that evolution does not attempt to account for, the things it
accepts as accident. This is the world as observed through that
lost mind.
MEDICINE IS AN ACCIDENT. There is no reason why an illness in a
human body should respond to some chemical from a plant or a
mineral. No reason why a chemical should make you feel high or low;
no reason why a chemical should make your blood run fast or slow.
The shampoo that makes your hair silky is an accident. That a
powder relieves your athlete’s foot is an accident.
Music is an accident. The idea that some sounds create symmetry
and cadence in ways that soothe, that stimulate, that elevate, that
inspire, is either an imaginary construct or a sort of
backwards-generated reality, i.e., the ear drum is annoyed by
certain sounds due to its fundamental sensitivities, so the
non-annoying sounds have a soothing effect. But when you close your
eyes during a symphony and think that you sense a wellspring of
spiritual energy coursing through your consciousness, or when you
compose a delightful melody and feel a goose-bump tingle that tells
you that greatness has kissed you for an instant, that’s all
imaginary, a form of wish projection.
Perfume is an accident. The fact that you enjoy the smell of a
musk extracted from a skunk’s tail and processed a certain way, or
particular flowers, or a spritz from a lemon, is entirely a
coincidence. Even the bad warning smells, like rotten food or
decomposing corpses, have no evolutionary explanation; they help
man avoid the object but they don’t help the object, so their
benefit is entirely extrinsic.
Virtually all beauty is an accident. The blue of the sky, the
palette of the rainbow, the rolling green of the hills, the mad
splash of floral beauty from the birds-of-paradise to the
intoxicating spectrum of orchid colors, the stunning effect where
the turquoise ocean merges into the azure sky, the cascading
freedom of the waterfall caressing the mountainside, the feathers
of the peacock, the arresting plumage of the avifauna, the
startling underwater montage of fish and anemones, all these — or
at least the fact that they are visually pleasing — are an
accident.
Virtually all flavor is an accident, too. Certainly any flavor
built on combined elements. This includes virtually all of our
cooking and seasoning. The way that chocolate syrup tastes on ice
cream. The way that crunchy chow mein noodles taste with soup. The
ability of an egg to taste good sunny-side up and taste good in a
whole different way when scrambled. The fact that flour bakes into
both bread and cakes, with endless possibilities for adjusting
crispness or chewiness. All coincidence. Just us fooling around
with what is and making the best of it.
And pretty much all food is an accident, too. The fact that our
bodies are able to take strength from the various levels of our
environment, with the most balanced diet generally consisting of a
little meat, a little chicken, a little fish, a little fruit, a
little vegetable, a little legume, is mostly just fortuitous.
UGGH, MY HEAD is hurting. Evolution without design is not merely
wrong. Wrongness is forgivable. It is a distorting prism, an
inversion, stunted and stunting, uglifying and stultifying, an
affront to the human intellect, a sneer at the aesthetic
sensibility. When you see the magnificence of the elephant, among a
vast array of wonderful creatures, it’s time to go to the mailbox
and send word to God that you’re paying attention.
