When the topic is creationism, or Intelligent Design, my thoughts turn unfailingly to another part of the school curriculum. Here, in fourteen lines of intricately rhymed iambic penatameter, is Robert Frost on the subject of "Design":
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Could the cheery conclusions of intelligent design's champions be dismissed with colder fury? Their logic is accepted and turned against them. A watch, therefore a watchmaker. But what, in that case, does a three-part albino horror show say about the universe's design?
Frost's best critic, fellow poet Randall Jarrell, directs special attention to the phrase "mixed ready to begin the morning right," which sounds as if it was lifted from an advertising jingle for breakfast food. In the context of this poem, it mocks official American optimism.
Frost was in his day America's most popular and honored poet. In his public life, he played the part of the craggy New Englander dispensing country wisdom and praising rural beauty. So successful was he in this effort that Jarrell invented a phrase, "the other Frost," to describe the author of the great poems on hopelessness, God's distance, nature's indifference, mental illness, impending doom, and the end of the world.
That Frost apparently felt compelled to invent a public persona with which to entertain an audience helps explain the enduring controversy of evolution. The idea that everything is made of atoms, a roughly equivalent building block of scientific knowledge that is if anything even less intuitive than evolution, does not offend the lecture-circuit crowd. Since there are no bruised sensibilities, there is no need to invent a persona, or concoct a rival theory.
Evolution is different. Besides being incompatible with a literal interpretation of biblical creation stories, it offers a different answer to the question: what is a human being? If our lives are explained finally by the same material processes that have produced all living organisms, then we are knocked off our pedestal, denied status as the "crown of creation," and instead appear continuous with "the beasts of the field," whom we are used to patronizing.
The intelligent design brigade denies more science than just evolution by natural selection. The universe is large, and so far as we can tell, almost all of it is an uninhabitable void. It would be remarkable if a resident of that void were to publish an essay asserting that the local conditions argue against a designed universe.
Yet that is what design's advocates seem to expect. "Look!" they (in effect) exclaim. "Isn't it wonderful that God created us here on earth, where conditions are suggestively conducive to life, instead of on some eternally frozen or poisonous orb in another corner of the universe, where no living thing could possibly survive for ten seconds!"
I know, I know, they are trying to win court cases, and so have pretty much left off saying "God." But that is what they mean.
I've digressed from Frost, whose poem looks not outward, to empty space, but to Earth's sometimes mutant ecology for evidence against design. Here is the last stanza of another Frost poem, wherein the theme is continued:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
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