An excerpt from INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS:
The Biblical
story is relatively open to interpretation, too, especially with respect to
time, and is even more open to interpretation when one considers life forms
that we now know exist but are not specifically mentioned in Genesis. Thus
there is a lot of wiggle room for people who want to use the Genesis story for
various reasons and in various ways, and depending on how the story is
interpreted, some fairly heavy theological issues surface. To illustrate some
of the problems involved in understanding special creation, we might consider
the group of parasites known as tapeworms. It takes very little knowledge of
zoology to realize that any answer to the question of when God made tapeworms—i.e., before or after their hosts—leads
inevitably to an interesting theological discussion because quite different
post-creation events must occur to explain these parasites’ continued
existence, depending on when they were supposedly made. Genesis 1:20-25 deals
with the world’s fauna, so we could infer that tapeworms were included in the
categories listed (“every living creature that moves”), or were simply included
with, and within, the larger animals mentioned, such as birds and cattle.
All
tapeworms are obligate parasites; they do not survive outside of their hosts,
except as eggs passed in host feces. Therefore, if God made tapeworms before He made their hosts such as the
birds and cattle specifically mentioned, then those worms must have been either
free-living or something we would not recognize as tapeworms. If they were
unrecognizable as tapeworms, then that means they were changed into tapeworms
by some mechanism not mentioned in the Bible, and because we’re discussing
creation instead of evolution, that mechanism has to involve a decision by God
to transform an existing, free-living, worm (we suppose it was a worm) into a
new kind of worm, this one a parasitic, segmented, hermaphroditic,
egg-producing machine dependent on its host’s defecation for survival as a
species. In other words, if we do not allow evolution to create a tapeworm from
a free-living ancestor, then we must allow God to accomplish exactly the same
thing as evolution evidently accomplished, although for some mysterious
supernatural reason. If God created tapeworms anew after He created their hosts, however, and furthermore, created
them in their present form, then He purposefully made a parasitic, segmented,
hermaphroditic, egg-producing machine dependent not only on its bird or cattle
host’s defecation for survival, but also on the eating of tapeworm eggs (=
eating of host feces) by various invertebrates such as beetles in which
infective larvae could develop.
But as if
the timing of tapeworm origin is not enough of a theological problem, the reason why God made tapeworms compounds
the difficulty of rationalizing their existence. It’s difficult to seriously
discuss why God made tapeworms because such a discussion quickly becomes an
exercise in creativity, carrying with it a strong dose of smart-aleck cynicism.
What was God thinking when He made these parasites? What was His intent? What
purpose did God have for such a creation? But let’s do the exercise because
it’s a fairly instructive one in terms of what we might call “creationism
theory,” although it involves an attempt to read the mind of God, an activity
some religions consider blasphemous and probably most consider impossible.
Nevertheless, let’s try to answer these questions, beginning with the idea of a
tapeworm in the mind of God, remembering, of course, that we could do these
exact same thought experiments with any of the 100,000 species of molluscs, the
300,000 species of beetles, the untold thousands of roundworm species, and just
to include plants, poison ivy.
INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS is available on all e-readers and as a nice paperback from amazon. Feel free to buy a copy and send it to your scientifically illiterate elected official.
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