Question

Hello. Not long ago you wrote a column in connection with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I’m interested in your response to his remarks here as well (I copied this from a lecture): “I want to quickly offer a rebuke of stupid design, and this will be quick. Look at all the things that want to kill us. Most planetary orbits are not stable, the process of star formation is completely inefficient, most places in the universe would kill life immediately! People say, ‘All the forces in nature are tuned precisely toward life’—look at the size of the universe in which we cannot live; you would die immediately. That’s not what I would call ‘paradise.’ The galactic orbits that we travel every few hundred million years—eventually we’ll get close enough to a supernova that will wipe out our ozone layer and kill all life on the surface. That is, everyone who doesn’t have dark skin, because the radiation level will give you cancer. We’re on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy; our spiral galaxy is doomed, beautiful as it may be, and of course we are in a universe expanding in one direction, which will end in the abyss of oblivion as the temperature of the universe asymptotically approaches zero. And that’s only the universe. On Earth—volcanoes, tsunamis have killed, you know, I think the number is even higher, up to 200,000 people, floods, tornadoes—none of this is a sign of the existence of some benevolent being out there. And the 90 percent there should be 99 percent as mentioned earlier, meaning 99 percent of all life that ever existed is extinct. A solar system like ours is like a shooting range: comets, asteroids—duck! And look how long it took to ‘build’ multicellular life. From the beginning of Earth’s existence life happened quickly, but not multicellular life; we needed the cyanobacteria to archive all the oxygen, to begin the ‘oxygen budget,’ and then you can have a kind of rocket fuel for multicellular life, but that took 3.5 billion years—you can’t call that an efficient (intelligent) plan when thinking about us (human beings). And in human beings, it’s the most tragic of all. I’m not even including here the free-will insurance policy by which human beings want to kill one another; I’m talking about nature killing us without human assistance. Aggressive leukemia in children, hemophilia, all this, all this (list…) and we… so much praise for the human eye, but anyone who has seen the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum knows how blind we really are, and part of that blindness means that we can’t see—we can’t detect magnetic fields, ionizing radiation, radon; we are there like sitting targets for ionizing radiation. We have to eat all the time, because we are warm-blooded. A crocodile eats chickens once a month and everything is fine, so we are always looking for more food. Those gases at the bottom of the list? You can’t smell or taste them; if you breathe them, you die. So… regarding birth defects, most… all this, abuse, infections, and other things connected to human beings—and here we have no idea (in percentages)—and you know, birth defects are especially tragic for the families who suffer from them, and you look at all these pictures of miscarried fetuses and most are stillborn, others are born with the heart outside the body and so on—this is all just stupid design. And the problem is that you’re looking for what is intelligent, and yes, you can find things that are really beautiful, you know—for example, the ball-and-socket joint of the shoulder, many things one can point to—but then you stop looking at the things that would challenge that ‘revelation,’ and so, for example, if I come across a frozen waterfall and I’m overwhelmed by its beauty, I’ll then turn to the nearby rock and try to find a centipede or some deadly striped newt, and then put everything in context and understand, of course, that the universe is not here for us for any single specific purpose. My favorite example is of course that we breathe, eat, and drink through the same opening in our body, which guarantees that some percentage of us will choke to death every year. Imagine if you had a separate opening for breathing and for eating and speaking—that would be really cool, right? I mean, you could drink, breathe, and just talk, and you’d never choke, and that’s not an excessive demand. Dolphins eat and breathe through separate openings in their bodies, and this is a mammal, so I’m not asking, you know—it’s like Santa Claus could grant such a wish. And this is of course my favorite—what’s going on there between our legs? Surely you’ve heard this already: an entertainment complex located in the middle of the sewage system. No engineer would ever design such a thing.”