Intelligent Design

Whither Goest Thou Today?

To: All Users
From: Intelligent Design Support Center (AKA IDSC)
Subject: Reality (Version 2008)

As of 1/1/2008 the present version of Reality 2007 will be superseded by Version 2008. This update of Reality is now open source and therefore not copy protected. You can now create your own Reality. As a consequence, idiosyncratic reality testing must now be conducted at your discretion. All forks to alternate realities will be at the user's risk and expense. To minimize conflicts, Reality Version 2008 can be networked in order to permit multiple realities.

Reality (2008) supports the following:

• You can have your cake and eat it, too. Calories consumed count only at the user's choosing.
• Once you've made your bed, you don't have to sleep in it. You can sleep in someone else's bed.
• You can go home again. If home doesn't exist in your current reality, V2008's windows allow you to go into someone else's home. When leaving one reality for another, please turn off the lights and lock up.
• Beauty is no longer restricted to the eyes of the beholder. It now includes the nose, ears, and forehead. In addition, beauty is no longer just skin deep, but now extends to underlying muscles as well.
• Undelete Function: Errors, omissions, faux pas, etc. can now be corrected by issuing the "OOPS" command. This command does not apply to forgotten birthdays or anniversaries, sports events or pregnancies.

There has been considerable confusion concerning the ultimate physical structures that have constituted Versions 1905 and higher. Especially noted has been the lack of macro-level analogies to illustrate sub-atomic activity and the difficulty in dealing with events on a cosmic scale.

IDSC has therefore decided to revert to the structure of Reality Version 400 BCE. All elements will once again be constituted from some combination of earth, air, fire and/or water. The substance of space beyond Earth's atmosphere will be composed of "aether" and all distances in outer space will be traversable within a human lifetime. This revision does not restore spontaneous generation or a geocentric cosmology.

Bugs In Reality Version 2007

Many users have called our attention to so-called bugs in previous versions of Reality, including war, disease, death, poverty, male pattern baldness, and the presence of human life on Earth. IDSC would like to make it clear that these are features of Reality, not bugs.

Note: Due to increased use of our Reality Support Hot Lines, we are forced to limit free phone support to the first ninety days of life. Support after that time will be available at a nominal charge. Increase support staff and additional phone lines should reduce call-in waiting time from the current 1-2 millennia to just a few hundred years. Subscribers will also be entitled to periodic revelations as well as our quarterly manifestations.

Look What’s Happened to Me! (I Can’t Believe Myself)

For super heroes, evolution is not a theory.

Our continuing pop culture fascination with mutant super humans suggests a hidden subtext promoting evolution over creationism. Like many of my generation, I’ve seen just about every superhero TV show or movie (except The Fantastic Four, nuff said). I used to watch the original Adventures of Superman when I was a boy. I caught the original Batman TV series, The Greatest American Hero (origin of the best TV theme song ever!), Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Buffy, TV-Star Trek series I, II, III, IV and V, and so on. (I include Star Trek even though the super powered characters were generally non-human). The latest chapter in video-hero evolution is Heroes, which each Monday night kicks 24’s butt.

Recently I’ve seen all the old and new Superman movies (should I say golden and tarnished silver age?), Batman Begins (which, compared to the other Batman films should have been called Batman Gets It Right), X-Men, Dos Equis, Triple Sec, and, of course, Spidey. (Does anyone besides me think that making Peter Parker a “webmaster” in the current Spider-Man comic series is just a little too cute?)

So here I am, a fifty-something baby boomer who has been brought up via the mass media on the Nietzschian belief that there can be supermen, that evolution is leading inexorably to human beings who can fly through the air, lift heavy things, cling to walls, change the weather (back at you, Mark Twain!), bend space and time and stretch their bodies like silly putty.

And why not? When you compare humanity’s current evolutionary state to our closest monkey’s uncle, it is clear that we are far superior. Our brains are so large that we only need to use 10% and often use much less. Every year some Olympian or Marathoner runs faster, jumps higher, swims more synchronously. To your average orangutan, we must seem like the types of Super Hominid into which they’d all like to evolve. But for those of us already at the top of the evolutionary trail, where is there to go but up, as in “up, up and away!”?

One clear advantage we have over the other apes is the ability to imagine the next steps in evolution and the amount of spandex that will be involved. No longer dependent on random genetic mutation to help us forage more efficiently for food or increase our ability to procreate, we can conceive of the types of super abilities that enable us to best the evil mutants who clearly didn’t get the evolutionary memo.

Evolution is no longer an environmental issue: It is a moral issue, which brings us back to creationism. If the purpose of evolution is not survival, but the triumph of good over evil, and if these stories are told with the aid of continually improving CGI, what chance have the stories collected in the Bible? If our morals and mores depend not on divine direction but on random mutation, what gives with that old time religion? One of the creepier aspects of Superman Returns, among many creepy things, was the rather obvious portrayal of the Man of Steel as a sort of divine intervener. Can a feature based on Ruben Bolling’s Godman be far behind?

By the way, I missed Heroes this week, but I did see Spider-Man 3 over the weekend.