A guilty pleasure

I've only watched the trailer and the short pre-views of this DVD. It seems to be a well-produced documentary about butterflies in general and Monarchs in particular, arguing the case for so-called Intelligent Design. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar into an actual butterfly is said to be a problem for Darwin's theory of evolution. Paul Nelson from Biola University and the Discovery Institute is prominently featured.

I don't believe in “intelligent design” in the creationist sense of that term, but I admit that the sneak peeks were a real guilty pleasure. Get real, guys, complete metamorphosis of the butterfly kind *is* difficult to explain on the basis of pure, reductionist, blind materialism! Of course, you're not allowed to actually *say* so, but since I'm pseudonymous, I might as well take my chances…

However (a big however), there are problems with creationist “intelligent design”, too. The strict dualism between Mind and Dead Matter doesn't seem to make much sense. Since everything points to the universe being very old, it's difficult to see why a supposedly omnipotent deity waited millions of years before creating the first butterflies out of nothing (or out of a pre-butterfly by an enforced macro-mutation). Why couldn't the deity rig the process in advance of the Big Bang? Or why can't the universe be a creative, ever-evolving emanation from a pan-en-theistic deity? Or a “fallen” emanation? This kind of soft teleology, with evolution based on some kind of pre-existent information matrix, makes most sense of the facts.

So yes, Virginia, butterflies really did evolve. So did moths, bombardier beetles and, cough cough, creationists. And no, the process wasn't strictly materialist or “blind”. Intelligence, consciousness and goal-directedness are parts of the deep structures of the universe. The butterflies are a particularly beautiful manifestion of these structures. Humans are…well, perhaps a more ugly (and blind) one. And yes, after spewing all this rank mysticism, I presumably have to go back to the 19th century, where I clearly belong!