Mysterious Ways

It appeared way back in the September 8 issue of the TLS, but I’ve only just read the review by Jerry A Coyne of Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise. Coyne applauds Crews’s skewering of contemporary fallacies–“not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb to irrational ideas: recovered-memory therapy, alien abduction, theosophy, Rorschach inkblot analysis, intelligent design creationism, and even poststructuralist literary theory.”

But what makes Coyne’s review worth retrieving from the recycling bin of old journalism is a paragraph by Crews, which amounts to the one of the pithiest and devastating refutations of the intelligent design “theory”:

Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities–one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away some fourteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company?

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Mysterious Ways