So you want me to believe in Intelligent Design (ID)? First you’ll have to explain why the human appendix exists.
Mine landed me on an operating table around midnight a couple of weeks before my 4th year High School exams. If left alone, it would have burst, spreading infection throughout my peritoneum. The surgeon showed it to me after I had recovered enough to care; I recall it being black.
The appendix plays a role in cellulose digestion in some mammalian species. If however humans were really created by an intelligent designer, independent of all other creatures, with no evolutionary path between some other species with a useful appendix, and us, one has to ask: why create the human species with a useless and dangerous organ?
As Douglas Theobold has said:
If the appendix does have an important function that we have yet to find, it is a leading candidate for the worst designed organ in the human body. How nice if the appendix would just degenerate away after it is no longer needed, so it could never get infected and kill us needlessly.
A programmer might say that God ought to have noticed that the appendix was “unreachable code”, and so could be optimised away.
Perhaps ID actually denotes “Incompetent Design”.
It seems to me that we have two explanations for the existence of the human appendix:
- It serves a useful role in some other mammalian species, and in some of our ancestors, but does not do so in us.
- God created each of us with an appendix because he/she is not benevolent or not omnipotent.
If the Designer is not omnipotent, why is he/she/it in the business of universe and people engineering?
In Science, just one chink in the armour of a theory can bring it down. Not so for ID?
