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Intelligent Design to a Father
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Here I was, all set to write something for Earth Day and wound up, a million miles away, writing another entry in the file of Things Which Irritate People (like this one here).
Someone was talking about Intelligent Design again the other day. You know this one, it is the idea that your father makes some phone calls any time he doesn’t like your job and he gets you a better one. Calls the judge when you get pulled over for DWI and makes a campaign pledge to get you out of trouble, that sort of thing. Is there whenever your life isn’t going how he wants it to, and redirects it without you ever knowing. As a father, and therefore something of an expert on this, I find that to be bad parenting, however you cut it.
How much more awesome is it to think of a Creator (if you think of a Creator) as being good enough to get it right without nudging the shot? Isn’t that our goal as dads anyway, to raise these urgent, sticky little people so that we never have to post bail or pay their rent?
Isn’t it infinitely cooler to think that there was a meme built into the program right at the start and, without any further guidance, we turned up, complete with the ability to fix problems without celestial interference? Kinda like hitting a hole in one, but the tee time was 5 billion years ago, before the Earth even cooled, and the shot had plenty of English on it to make sure it zigged and zagged long enough… on the off-chance that something like humans were going to show up in the soup (because there was no plan), invent golf, and put a par-4 with a hole right there so that as the Earth orbited the Sun it would rotate into the trajectory of the ball for the ace.
On the other hand, Intelligent Design says God is good enough to make it onto the green in 3. Which is less than impressive.
But I’m going to test my theory. See, I don’t think God planned the Prius, Kim Jong Il, and my back pain. I don’t even think God planned humans. I think, if anything, God created a spark of life somewhere back in the soup of the early universe, bent close to it, and whispered into the (obviously symbolic) ears of its tiny gene code, “BE BETTER,” and that was enough. And I’m going to try that with my kids. No fire and brimstone, no wooden paddle hanging from a bent nail over the stove, no promises of paradise or ice cream if they pick up all the trucks. Just a repetition, a cadence for their steps, “be better.” Because, speaking as a father, that’s a much better way to raise your kids.
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