50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Part 9

THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD.

Overall I was a very good student through twelve years of public school in Florida. I graduated from high school with academic honors, a varsity letter in track, and no felonies on my record. I also managed perfect attendance six of those twelve years. The point is, I showed up and I paid attention most of the time. But never once in all those cla.s.ses with all those teachers did I hear or read about evolution. Not once. No teacher so much as whispered to me or hinted anything about Australopithecus, Louis Leakey, or the HMS Beagle. No Neanderthals or trilobites ever crept into my curriculum. Fortunately, I was personally curious about science so I read a lot independently. I also went to a good university where I ended up learning all about the foundational theory of life that I am a part of. But what about my peers back in high school, the ones who maybe weren't as curious or never took college biology and anthropology courses? What happened to them?

Today an alarming 40 percent of Americans believe that Earth is less than ten thousand years old and all life was created instantly in its present form.3 Statistics like that disturb paleoanthropologist Tim White. He worked with Don Johanson on the Lucy fossils and has made his own key discoveries in the field of human evolution, including Idaltu Man, the oldest anatomically modern human found to date. I sensed that he is both puzzled and frustrated by creationism's popularity.

"It frightens me more than disappoints," White said. "Understanding evolution, understanding that the biological world that includes us evolved, is essential. This is true in virtually every field of inquiry, fields as disparate as medicine, agriculture, and sociology. Education is the key to improving awareness."4 As important as general education is to this problem, I think that basic awareness of how evolution is integral to modern biology is the first step. I have encountered too many people who wrongly think that one can reject evolution while still being proscience. But this just isn't possible. Trying to embrace modern biology while rejecting evolution is like driving a car while rejecting rubber tires and the internal combustion engine.

IS EVOLUTION EVIL?.

Another huge, though totally unnecessary, problem is that creationists have been misled into believing that evolution is an evil philosophy that leads to individual and social ruin. Merely teaching evolution in a high school science cla.s.s, they claim, leads inevitably to drug abuse, teen pregnancy, violence, and a general collapse of morality. Somehow, this biological theory is a green light for people to run amok and knock down the pillars of civilization. Apparently it is fine to be related to Caligula and Stalin but not Neanderthals and h.o.m.o erectus. No matter how many times this is explained to me by creationists, I still struggle to understand how they can blame teaching the theory of evolution for crime and immorality. They say that it places us with the animals and thereby makes us no better than wild animals. But this makes no sense because evolution is a scientific explanation of the world around us. It's based on sound reasoning, numerous lines of evidence, and verified predictions. It just happens to be the way life works. How does learning about it give us permission to do evil and tear down civilization? This creationist charge is not only illogical but it is absolutely unproven, too. I'm pretty sure that the crime rate of the world's professional evolutionary biologists is pretty low. I'd be willing to bet that it's lower than preachers and priests. n.o.body knows evolution better than the people who research it, write about it, and teach it full-time, yet the vast majority of them seem to live remarkably decent and quiet lives. I'm also guessing that the ratio of prisoners who are behind bars due to some fateful day that they picked up a Richard Dawkins book and read about evolution is probably small to nonexistent.

Yes, the n.a.z.is had unscientific ideas about racial superiority linked to flawed notions of "survival of the fittest." However, nothing they did was morally justified or excused by the theory of evolution. Creationists should recognize that people were quite capable of killing and destroying long before Charles Darwin was even born. We decide for ourselves whether or not to do bad things and we have to take responsibility for our actions. Not only is a connection between understanding evolution and immoral behavior unproven, it is also irrelevant to the natural world. Reality is unaffected by high school curricula. Life will continue to evolve even if every criminal in the world chants Darwin's name while committing their evil acts. Evolution will not stop even if every nice person in the world rejects it. Our intellectual and emotional preferences are not as important to the universe as we might imagine. We may not think it's nice, for example, when warplanes drop bombs on civilians. But gravity will remain with us, nonetheless, even if we were to reject it and demand that an alternative theory be taught to our children in schools.

Some creationists think people who accept modern biology have adopted evolution or nature as their religion, with Charles Darwin as some sort of messiah figure. This is laughable, of course. For the record, I don't worship at the altar of evolution. I think nature as we see it work here on Earth is a horrible way to run a planet. For example, there is far too much predation-too much pain felt by too many creatures. Yes, I am awed and endlessly fascinated by the story of life and the staggering biodiversity that has evolved here. And I'm always vulnerable to nature's beauty. Whether I am scuba diving, canoeing on the Amazon River or sitting on a park bench watching a squirrel watch me, I easily become entranced by the natural world. But the overall way in which this unintelligent and indifferent nature operates does not warm my heart in the slightest. Look behind the pretty flowers and leaping dolphins and one quickly discovers a vast dungeon of horrors. Those who see the handiwork of a wise and loving G.o.d in nature need to look again. There certainly is great beauty to be found as well as countless examples of cooperation and peaceful coexistence, but the natural world is also a constant bloodbath of incomprehensible suffering. Every second of every day, pain-feeling creatures are eaten alive by parasites and predators. The fear of being stalked and eaten is always present for trillions of creatures.

One of the most powerful memories from my travels in Africa is the sight of blood-soaked lions making a ghoulish feast from the gut of a still-twitching zebra. Predators have to eat too, so no one can fault the lions, of course. But if zebras could talk, I doubt they would tell us that they think lions and all of nature were created by a just G.o.d.

If zebras don't matter to you, try watching a good zombie movie (or a bad one). Wait for the inevitable scene where a minor character is caught and eaten alive by a gang of the hungry undead. Imagine that it is you the zombies are taking apart bite by bite. Close your eyes for a couple of seconds and think about the terror and pain of losing your life, one mouthful at a time. Horrifying, isn't it? But that's business as usual, another day at the office for most life on this planet.

If I were a G.o.d with a minimal amount of compa.s.sion and empathy, I certainly would not have crafted a cruel and savage system like the one we have here on Earth. For starters, I think I might have powered all life by photosynthesis or at least made all animals herbivores. I could have tinkered with reproduction rates and natural life spans to avoid overpopulation. There are so many things I would do differently. I certainly would have opted not to create the malaria protozoa, seeing how it tortures and kills thousands of children every day. I might have left out cancer too. No, I don't have limitless love and admiration for nature as we find it here on Earth. I merely accept it as the way life works and find what beauty within it that I can.

I suppose I should add that I am aware of the Christian explanation for all the horrors of nature that we see today. Some claim that G.o.d let the world become as it is because Adam and Eve broke one of his rules in the Garden of Eden. Blaming so much pain, suffering, and death on one guy for biting one apple seems pretty unreasonable to me, however.

"JUST A THEORY"

Creationists tell me over and over that evolution is "just a theory" and that no one has ever observed it. This is another example of poor science education in schools in America and many other places around the world. Scientists do not casually toss the word theory around the way nonscientists do. For most people theory means nothing more than a hunch or a guess. For scientists, however, a theory is a formal explanation of something important that is backed up by a lot of very good evidence. It also has to be testable and make reliable predictions about the real world. Evolution pa.s.ses with flying colors on all counts.

It's important for creationists to know that evolution has been observed because some of them claim that because evolution happened so long ago it can't be seen and therefore can't be proved. Not that everything in science has to be seen by human eyes to be proved (archaeologists don't see what happened at their sites hundreds or thousands of years before they started digging, but they still manage to do very good work), but I understand that observation can make it more believable to the general public. Fortunately, scientists have witnessed evolution. They have been able to do this because life is always evolving and some life-forms-bacteria, viruses, and insects, and some types of weeds, for example-have relatively fast reproduction rates. Bacteria can clock a thousand generations in a little over one month. By comparison, a thousand generations takes us more than twenty thousand years.5 With that sort of turnover, evolutionary changes occur fast enough for scientists to observe them.

The claim that life is too complex to have "just happened" is another core argument of creationists. But complexity is not proof of their G.o.d's existence or his involvement with life on Earth, just as evolution's explanation of so much doesn't disprove the existence of G.o.ds. Our inability to fully understand life may say something about our current limitations, but it does not necessarily say anything about the processes and origin of life. If I brought a prehistoric human back to the present in my time machine and showed her a television, it probably would be a challenge to convince her that the TV wasn't magic and that I was not some sort of a G.o.d. But her failure to grasp how a television and a remote control work should not be seen by her or anyone else as evidence that televisions are supernatural devices. Given enough time and effort, "impossible knowledge" often comes into focus. Repeatedly throughout history things that were seen as too complex and forever beyond human comprehension ended up solved and incorporated as standard fodder for high school textbooks.

Perhaps the favorite argument of creationists is the old watch a.n.a.logy: If the complexity of a watch reveals that it was designed by an intelligent being, then the greater complexity of a human body must mean that it was made by an even more intelligent being-a G.o.d. After all, a watch doesn't just "come together" on its own, so how can anyone believe that humans, more complex than a watch, were created naturally by luck and chance? This is a bad argument for a few reasons. First, we know who makes watches: human watchmakers. Second, we also know what shaped the human body into its current form. It was replication, variation, and natural selection over millions of years. I agree with creationists when they say they see design in the human body. And they are correct that there is a designer. According to the best current evidence, however, the designer appears to be neither intelligent nor divine. We owe our physical structure, both its wonders and its flaws, to the indifferent and blind process of evolution. It's a process that is not random or completely by chance, but there is no underlying intelligent strategy to it. It is merely life's interaction with whatever environment it finds itself in. There is no goal, no ascending ladder, in evolution. Success is defined as anything better than extinction. What appears to be the champion life-form today might vanish in an instant tomorrow when the environment changes. Maybe a G.o.d did have something to do with it, but without evidence for such an idea, how can we justify pretending to know?

People on both sides of this debate may disagree, but I believe the evolution-versus-creationism conflict has been misaligned from the start. The proper debate, if there has to be one, should be "a natural origin of life" versus creationism. Evolution describes how life changes over time. Yes, it has key implications for the natural origin of life, of course. However, it does not directly address how life started. The key moment when something that was not alive became something alive is not currently understood by science and may never be.

THE MOTHER OF ALL DEBATES.

I predict that the mother of all debates is yet to come. Currently scientists have interesting ideas about how life may have started on Earth, but it's no secret that no one really knows. That may change, however, as scientists are working in labs right now to create self-replicating synthetic organisms-life. Success in this seems likely and will probably come sooner rather than later. There will always be questions, but if scientists are able to create life, then a very compelling theory of origins may follow close behind. If so, creationists will likely drop evolution as their great bogeyman overnight. They will realize that all this time they have been arguing for a divine origin of life against people who were arguing that life changes-two positions that are not in perfect opposition as most have always a.s.sumed. Natural origin versus supernatural origin is the real war. Once that fight heats up, evolution is sure to become standard fare in every science cla.s.s, even in private religious schools. The outrage and fear over evolution will evaporate just like that other colossal crisis centuries ago over whether or not the Sun revolved around the Earth. Of course, when the irrational battle against evolution falls silent, creationists probably won't pause to apologize for having been so wrong, wasted so much time, and degraded the education of so many children, because they will be too busy fighting the new scientific theory of life's origin. Here we go again.

LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

Evolution is a fascinating and important topic that has been woefully neglected in many schools and elsewhere because of an unfortunately and mostly unnecessary conflict with religion. As a result, few know what evolution is. Millions of people fear, hate, and reject something they don't even understand. Please don't be misled by mistaken or dishonest claims that the theory of evolution is evil, not well established, or necessarily incompatible with belief in a G.o.d. If you want to be in tune with modern science and desire a basic understanding of life on your planet, you must accept that life evolves. The evidence for this is not only found in museums and libraries around the world. It's in you. Every cell in your body is a testament to more than three billion years of life on Earth. Regardless of what you may have been told, evolution is not the enemy. Evolution is you.

CREATIONISM EVOLVES.

It was long overdue, but in 1987 the US Supreme Court ruled that creationism is obviously a religious belief and as such cannot be taught in public school science cla.s.ses because it violates the first amendment to the Const.i.tution. But this did not drive it to extinction. As we shall see in the next chapter, creationism evolved to live and fight another day under a new name.

GO DEEPER...

Books Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Hazen, Robert M. Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry, 2007.

Hosler, Jay. Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth. New York: Hill and w.a.n.g, 2011.

Leeming, David. A Dictionary of Creation Myths. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Loxton, Daniel. Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press, 2010.

Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002.

Miller, Kenneth R. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.

National Academy of Sciences. Science, Evolution, and Creationism. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008.

Palmer, Douglas. Origins: Human Evolution Revealed. New York: Mitch.e.l.l Beazley, 2010.

Pigliucci, Ma.s.simo. Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer a.s.sociates, 2002.

Potts, Richard, and Christopher Sloan. What Does It Mean to Be Human? Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010.

Prothero, Donald R. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Sawyer, G. J., and Viktor Deak. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design. New York: Times Books, 2006.

Smith, Cameron M. The Fact of Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.

Smith, Cameron M., and Charles Sullivan. The Top 10 Myths about Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006.

Stringer, Chris. Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York: Times Books, 2011.

Stringer, Chris, and Peter Andrews. The Complete World of Human Evolution. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Stringer, Lauren, and Peters Westberg. Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story. New York: Harcourt Children's Books, 2003.

Tattersall, Ian. Extinct Humans. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Ward, Peter. Future Evolution: An Illuminated History of Life to Come. New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001.

Zimmer, Carl. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Other Sources Becoming Human: Unearthing our Earliest Human Ancestors (DVD), PBS, 2010.

Talk Origins, www.talkorigins.org.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the a.s.sumption that n.o.body is smart enough to figure out the answer to the problem.

-Neil deGra.s.se Tyson Even n.o.ble souls can become corrupted with wrong education.

-Plato, The Republic Creationism is religion. It's about believing in a G.o.d in a particular way that forces everything else to fall in line with that belief no matter what facts, logic, evidence, and reality say. Creationism is a problem in a country like the United States because the government and its public schools are supposed to be neutral on matters of religion. The 1987 Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard made it crystal clear once and for all that it is unconst.i.tutional to teach overt creationism in public school science cla.s.ses because creationism is religion. The ruling did, however, make the point that there is nothing to prohibit the teaching of multiple theories about the origin of humankind, so long as they are scientific and nonreligious. In hindsight, the reaction, to this ruling by determined antievolutionists was predictable. They would give creationism a makeover.

Some clever creationists figured that by repackaging it as something scientific and not blatantly religious, they could sneak it back into cla.s.srooms. They named their creation "intelligent design" (ID). It was a crafty idea for sure, but there were two big problems: it wasn't scientific and it was religion. ID is just creationism all over again. ID's claim is that life is too complex to have happened "by chance" or by natural processes and, therefore, an intelligent designer must be responsible. Of course, savvy ID proponents didn't come right out and say that the designer is their G.o.d, but that's the implication, of course.

WRONG EVEN IF IT'S RIGHT.

At the core of intelligent design is the arrogant idea that life is so complex that it could not exist without an intelligent creator. It is arrogant because it a.s.sumes what we don't know now, we can never know. For this reason, embracing intelligent design is wrong even if it should one day turn out to right. Yes, I really mean that. As it exists at the moment, ID "theory" is so bad, so lame, such a pointless, defeatist, and poorly conceived concept that no thoughtful person should go anywhere near it. Intelligent design is toxic to the mind not because it seems so very wrong but because of the message it sends to people-young students in particular. ID suggests that an unanswered question is an unanswerable question. Everything about intelligent design screams: Give up! Stop trying to figure out how life originated and changed over time. Just say "G.o.d did it" and shut up. Regardless of whether or not a G.o.d or G.o.ds did create life, retreating from the challenge of biological mysteries so early in the game is neither wise nor brave. A more honest name for ID "theory" would be: "Biology is really hard so let's stop trying." Intelligent design is not science; it's the opposite of science. It's the ma.s.s marketing of intellectual surrender. ID should be rejected on principle alone. Look at it this way: if fairies were discovered tomorrow in somebody's backyard, it wouldn't suddenly mean that all the fairy believers of previous centuries were brilliant thinkers who were ahead of the curve and wiser than fairy skeptics. Maybe aliens really did build the pyramids in Egypt. But without one speck of credible evidence, it's an irrational belief one cannot intellectually justify holding today, even if it turns out to be true tomorrow. Should those who believe in intelligent design today ever be proven correct, it would not be because they were more sensible and aligned with science. They would be right for all the wrong reasons.

The ID claim that life is "too complex" to ever be explained by natural means is outrageously presumptuous. "Too complex"? Who could possibly know such a thing based on our current knowledge? The orbit of Earth around the Sun was once "too complex" for science. Should we have stopped trying to figure it out? Everything was "too complex" at some point in our past. Who can say that one day in the future we won't understand how life originates and functions in complete detail? Intelligent design proponents must know the future, for how else can they declare a cell to be forever beyond the reach of natural explanations as revealed by science? How do they know?

Anyone who looks into intelligent design will run into something called "irreducible complexity." Again, this is nothing more than jumping to extraordinary and unjustified conclusions: we don't know how all the parts of this cell could have evolved to work in unison like this, so it must have been put together by an intelligent designer. This is transparent nonsense. What about nonliving things that are complex? "[I]ntricacy and organization can be readily inferred even from things that were clearly not consciously designed," argues scientist Jonathan Marks. "Snowflakes are intricate, but does anyone really think that G.o.d unleashes a horde of microscopic chiselers in constructing a blizzard? I may not know much about the physics of crystal formation, but it's got to be a better explanation than that one."1 This is really the same old creationism. The difference is that intelligent design is packaged and marketed to appear scientific, though it is anything but. Slick promotion has fooled much of the public into thinking that the ID/evolution controversy is about fairness rather than antiscience and religion masquerading as science. "Teach both sides," is often heard. No less an authority figure than a former president, George W. Bush, said both evolution and intelligent design should be taught in science cla.s.ses. One could advocate for astrology to be given equal time in astronomy cla.s.ses. It would make just as much sense.

The fatal flaw of intelligent design has nothing to do with the ident.i.ty of its proponents, their politics or religious beliefs, who funds it, or anything else along those lines. All that matters is that there is no good evidence, rational argument, or valid theory to support the idea that life was created by a G.o.d, extraterrestrial, or other intelligent being. None. Maybe it did happen that way. But until someone comes up with some real scientific evidence for it, we can't know for sure and should not pretend that we do.

The best argument one can make against intelligent design has nothing to do with DNA or fossils. Simply point to where its leading advocates choose to fight their battles. This reveals everything we need to know because they do not wage war with their arguments and evidence in academic conferences and on the pages of scientific journals. No, they do their fighting in courtrooms, school board meetings, political campaigns, on websites, and in books and pamphlets. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes the stark absence of intelligent design from the scientific process: "Since 1973, more than one hundred thousand peer-reviewed papers on neo-Darwinian evolution have been published. ID is represented by just a single peer-reviewed paper, and this is a generous estimate because that paper has been refuted."2 This is not how proper science is done. It's not how we go about determining what is real and what is not. Real science grows from the clash of ideas and claims where the victor is determined by who has the superior evidence. It's not a popularity contest. It doesn't matter if a scientific claim is presented by good people, bad people, ugly people, nice-looking people, religious people, atheists, poor people, or rich people. All that matters ultimately is who can put the best evidence on the table for all to see. Sometimes winning takes a long time. And winning is always conditional; it's never final. Some see it as a weakness, but it's the best thing about science. It's a good thing to change when change is called for. Nothing is written in stone when it comes to science. Everything is always up for grabs, open to revision, and vulnerable to attack. If I happen to have a eureka moment while I'm taking a shower tonight and figure out something that tears down the theory of evolution, my first impulse will be to write it down and send it to the journal Nature. My first move definitely would not be to attempt to pack some school board with people who agree with me so that high school kids can be taught my new theory-no matter what the world's scientists think of it. No, I would go the route of publication, fame, and fortune, as anyone would who had a winning theory. I suppose I could put up a slick website and print pamphlets to hand out in churches, but I would rather pick up a n.o.bel Prize for my Darwin-destroying theory on my way to the bank to deposit all the fat checks I would receive from book advances and speaking engagements.

Those who think intelligent design is scientific should ask themselves why the leaders of the ID movement don't act like scientists. More to the point, why don't real scientists take intelligent design seriously and embrace it? If there were anything to it, there is absolutely no doubt that many would. It is ludicrous to suggest that they choose not to rock the boat in the evolution-loving subculture of science or can't due to censorship. Even if mainstream secular universities were silencing scientists who possess powerful new evidence capable of sinking evolution, it doesn't explain why we do not see game-changing ideas and data emerging from religious universities. Surely Oral Roberts and Liberty Universities would not censor their professors or students if any of them could make a compelling case for intelligent design. There is also the opportunity for intelligent design proponents to write their own books or start their own science journals. If they knew something significant, they could and would make it public. And, if there were anything to it, the world's scientists would not ignore it. We can only conclude that ID proponents have no case to make beyond the political campaigning, lobbying, and public sales pitches that we have seen.

"What is really going on in the ID movement is that highly educated religious men are justifying their faith with sophisticated scientific arguments," explains Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of Why Darwin Matters. "This is old-time religion dressed up in newfangled language. The words change but the arguments remain the same. As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.' The creationism of William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationism of the intelligent design theorists is a farce."3 GO DEEPER...

Books Brockman, John, ed. Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Humes, Edward. Monkey Girl: Education, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Margulis, Lynn, and Dorian Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Smith, Cameron, and Charles Sullivan. The Top 10 Myths about Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006.

Soutwood, Richard. The Story of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Tattersall, Ian, and Rob DeSalle. Bones, Brains, and DNA: The Human Genome and Human Evolution. Piermont, NH: Bunker Hill Publishing, 2007.

Weinberg, Steven. Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Young, Matt, and Taner Edis. Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Zimmer, Carl. The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. New York: Roberts, 2009.

Other Sources Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (DVD), Nova.

If things were different, things would not be the way they are.

-Robert L. Park,

Superst.i.tion: Belief in the Age of Science

A common justification for believing in a G.o.d or G.o.ds that I have heard from people around the world is that the universe and Earth are so perfectly tuned for life that their G.o.d (always their G.o.d over millions of others) must have designed and created it. All of this around us could not possibly have just happened by chance. This must be a very attractive idea to religious people because it's repeated in the same way by many followers of many contradictory belief systems. Like any idea, however, popularity doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense.

If the extent of one's awareness about animal life stops at a dog, a goldfish, or an occasional visit to a zoo, then I suppose it may be understandable if one doesn't appreciate how incredibly difficult, violent, disgusting, and unfair existence is for most life on our planet. Right this moment, as you are reading this sentence, millions of creatures are being pierced, clawed, snapped in half, chewed and swal-lowed-while still alive. A constant and incomprehensible flow of pain and suffering is standard operating procedure, just the way life goes on this planet. If our world is finely tuned for life, then why is the overall extinction rate more than 95 percent? If this planet is intelligently designed specifically for life to flourish, then why are struggle, disease, agony, misery, and failure the norm?

If Earth had significantly more ma.s.s, or less ma.s.s, if there were no water, or if the atmosphere were different, then we couldn't exist. So what? If the conditions were so different that we could not exist-then we would not exist. Nothing should be so difficult to understand about that. There is life here and no life on the Moon, for example. That's just how it is. If the Moon had an ocean and an atmosphere like Earth's, then maybe there would be life on it. But since there is no life there, should we conclude that the Moon was intelligently designed to exclude life? By this sort of logic, any kind of environment can be attributed to an intelligent designer no matter if it can support life or not.

Those who believe the Earth is tuned for life get it precisely backward. Life has been tuned for the Earth. And the tuning was/is done by the natural process of evolution. This makes more sense than anything else, especially in light of all the dead ends and unintelligent designs that are found in many life-forms, including us. A basic understanding of evolution makes it easier to grasp why there are so many oxygen-breathing animals on a planet that has lots of oxygen. It explains why there are so many life-forms with fins and gills on a planet that has so much water. And it makes sense for all these sun-dependent plants to exist on a sunny planet. If life fits on Earth, it's because it evolved here.

Look around the Earth. Some creatures evolved in extremely hot environments; others evolved in extremely cold environments. If the entire Earth had been freezing cold for the last one hundred million years, then hot-weather creatures would either not be here today or they would be very different. Should we conclude, then, that the Arctic was "designed" for polar bears because that's where polar bears live? Isn't it more likely that polar bears have evolved to survive in cold environments and that's why we find them in a cold place like the Arctic If they hadn't evolved for cold weather, they either wouldn't exist or they would have evolved to live someplace else. What we can say for polar bears on one part of this planet, we can say for all life on this planet. If conditions were different, life would be different-or simply not exist.

Many people say the entire universe, like the Earth, is fine-tuned for life. But this claim falls far short too. Of course there are key qualities to this universe that we rely upon to live, but most likely that is only because we exist in this universe and we evolved under these conditions. If our universe was fundamentally different-say atoms didn't exist and matter was constructed of something else-then we would either be made up of something other than atoms or we would not exist. It's as simple as that.

Another problem with this claim of a universe designed to cater to our needs is the fact that the universe doesn't seem very hospitable to us! Most Earth life, with the exception of some microbes, would not last long in s.p.a.ce or on any other known celestial bodies. We certainly can't survive without making a significant effort to fend off the h.e.l.lish environment that seems to be standard throughout virtually all the universe. s.p.a.ce is too cold, too hot, and has too much radiation for most life-forms we are familiar with. It's also mostly empty, hardly ideal for building a home and raising a family. Overall, the universe does not appear to be the most hospitable place one could imagine, or design and create for humans if one had such powers and such a desire. Earth is also far from ideal and certainly does not seem to be intelligently designed and built specifically with human needs, comfort, and safety in mind. If it were, why are there hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, supervolcanoes, the Ebola virus, and so on? Any designer with an ounce of compa.s.sion would have left those out of the recipe, right?

I suspect that this common belief of an Earth and an entire universe created and catered for us is nothing more than human arrogance. Don't forget, we had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, away from believing that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now many of us are clinging to the belief that we are still centrally important, if not centrally located. "The universe was made just for me," sounds a lot like the imagination and insecurities of a self-centered child. But in fairness, who knows? Maybe the universe really is custom-made for us by divine design. But until we learn a lot more about this universe we find ourselves in, it is preposterous to make such a bold a.s.sumption without evidence.

GO DEEPER...

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Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Hawking, Stephen. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam, 2011.

Potter, Christopher. You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. London: Hutchinson Radius, 2009.

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985.

Stenger, Victor J. The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.