Design? Hardly.

One of the biggest issues I have with religion, especially Christianity, is that of the so called "intelligent design theory". Past readers of the old Gibah's Room will remember my post about this farce but I'm going to reiterate and expand here.

Intelligent Design - what is it?

Well, basically, its a theory that was put forth by religious scientists who believe that even a cell is so deliciously complex that it could not have occurred by chance, but by design - and they attribute the designer to be a god or god-like extraterrestrial species.

What's wrong with that?

There are three clear points that, once shown, blow the idea of intelligent design right out the window.

For starters, it touches on a massive misconception within the religious community that evolution is a product of random chance mutations within a species, and that is just not the case. Evolution theory is founded on the idea of natural selection and, through that, adaptation to an environment.

Natural selection is the process whereby a species improves itself, over millennia in some cases, in order to survive a change in environmental conditions. It is hardly chance - it is a natural reaction to change within the cells of a creature that allows a species to survive.

Therefore a sparrow might have evolved from the same creature as the penguin, but one adapted and evolved to be able to fly quickly and through small spaces while the other adapted and evolved to allow it to swim - but they are both distinctly birds.

Therefore the idea that evolution is a product of chance is wildly inaccurate and shows a poor understanding of evolution theory.

The second point is that of the theory itself. In order to have a theory, you must first have a basis and a groundwork on which to test your theory and hypothesis. Intelligent design is not a theory, as it is not testable. I'd like to see the experiment that attempts to do so. How do you scientifically test for the existence of a god, and then, how do you prove that the god you found was capable of creating a single-cell organism, or even a fully fledged human, simply on a whim of insane architecture?

And that brings me to the third point: who designed the designer? If the designer, in this instance a god, is complex enough to design something as complex as the planet we inhabit, as well as the countless stars, planets and asteroids that exist in this universe, then something must have designed that entity, based on the "theory" of intelligent design. If that is the case, then who designed the designer of the designer of us? Who designed the designer of the designer of the designer of us? And so on, so forth. The idea is ludicrous and un-testable and relies solely on the idea of faith, which proves nothing.

So what about the alternative?

The alternative is natural selection theory. Unlike intelligent design, is is inherently testable, and has been since Darwin and Wallace first proposed it. In countless experiments and real-world observations we have seen populations of a species adapt to an environmental change. These observations occur and are reported constantly. Therefore we have an overwhelming body of research and evidence that supports adaptation to an environmental change - a cornerstone of natural selection.

So rather than an untestable theory that relies on faith to support it, I go where the proof is.

A Fresh Start, and a Point to the Blog

Before I begin, a moment of your time, please.

Hello bloggers.

A quick mouse over to the previous posts section of this blog will reveal...nothing. I have deleted all the previous posts on this blog, in the hopes that I will eventually get to the point of something, anything. And I think I know what Gibah's Room will be doing - discussing religion, being athiest, and why the latter is correct.

So a few things: Gibah's Room now has a new subtitle. It has a new colour scheme. It will KEEP the "currently/previously read" section in the side column because I think everyone likes to know (everyone that reads this, anyway). There will no longer be stupid posts about random things that piss me off, or make me happy, or whatever. No more reviews or anything like that - they will go to my deviantART page.

Now that I have the radical changes out of the way, lets get started on the topic of the blog.

I thought I was a pagan, but...

Well, pagan insofar as I liked and tried to emulate some of the basic Nordic pagan rituals and beliefs. But really, it was going nowhere, and I realise that it was a way of trying to hold on to some aspect of life that I had, intentionally, set behind me.

In my early teenage years I thought of myself as Christian. I attended church most Sundays. I started to read the Bible (Old and New testaments) again. I tried to find some purpose that this great omnipotent God had destined for me. I believed, despite growing up with dinosaurs and the scientific thoughts that go with it, that maybe God had created the world, that maybe the world was so large and mysterious that it had to have been created by God, because God was the only entity capable of such wondrous machinations. I was, for all intents and purposes, a fundamentalist.

Then I grew up a little bit more, and saw more of the world and its cruelty. I witnessed my father go to prison for murder, I saw people get pissed and drugged up so badly that they vomited or passed out, I listened to people and their lewd sex stories. I watched porn, smoked tobacco and drank bourbon. And I had a revelation. God cannot possibly be part of this behaviour. Why would he, in his omnipotent glory, cause a person's destiny to be nothing but sex, drugs and alcohol? Why would he allow people to live in the streets? To kill each other in wars, to illegally ascend to the highest office in the Western world, to take a person's new-found and convenient Christianity and praise them for it even though they have just sentenced that person to a prison term for murder?

I delved back into science and, specifically, my dinosaurs again, for a shirt but valuable period. I allowed myself to learn about evolution again, and excelled at the subject in Biology during years 11 and 12 of high school. I became convinced that the world was not created by an oppressive, megalomaniac deity obsessed with control and praise, but by natural selection and random mutation within a species.

So why then, did I slip back into a religious belief while studying the Nordic mythology? Was I trying to find a substitute for Christianity after I had renounced it? I think, maybe I was.

What I realise now is that I didn't have to do that, I had already found an answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything and, even better, I agreed whole-heartedly with it. I believe in fact, in evidence, in that which we can prove here and now: evolution is why we, as a species, exist today.

Someone out there will undoubtedly be reading this and saying, but hang on, evolution has not been observed in a laboratory yet, and until then, it cannot be "proven". I tell you, we are close to proving the evolution theory. Click this link and read for yourself: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html

This is real, this is happening, this is now. That article was posted on the New Scientist website on the 9th of June, 2008. As the article suggests, more research is being conducted, by already the implications of this research as it stands is astounding.

Adaptation within a species, allowing it to process a new food source which, in turn, will allow this species to survive for longer. Textbook evolution.

The fact this this occurred in one of the more simple bacterium on Earth, E.coli, only further lends credence to the hypothesis that all life may have originally evolved from simple single cell bacteria. This is exciting to no end.

Your belief in evolution proclaims you an athiest.

Well, yes, yes it does. I'm reading a book at the moment by one Richard Dawkins, author of numerous best-sellers. This book is entitled The God Delusion and I recommended it to all interested in either side if this argument.

Early on, Dawkins gives a very simple, easy to understand table of a person's beliefs. I reproduce it here now, without permission but, at least, referenced.

"Let us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two extremes of opposite certainty. The spectrum is continuous, but it can be represented by the following seven milestones along the way.

1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G.Jung, "I do not believe, I know."

2. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. "I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there."

3. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God."

4. Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. "God's existence and non-existence are equally equiprobable."

5. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. "I don't know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be sceptical."

6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."

7. Strong athiest. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction that Jung "knows" there is one.""*

Think about where you are on this scale, which I shall call the Dawkins Scale for arguments sake. I was a 6, but recently upgraded myself to a 7. Where are you on the scale? Where would you like to be?

That will do for today. I'll blog soon.
*Quote from The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Black Swan 2006, page 73 of the paperback version.