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Often I like to make someone fighting mad, just so that I can help some dead person feel alive about something.  But I was able to make readers white-hot mad only once while I have been writing at the Beacon.  That was back in January 10 of last year, when I wrote a piece called “What’s the big panic about intelligent design?”  That piece drew comments so angry that I thought I could see veins sticking out of the necks from the invisible readers posting them.

In my article, I was inferring that the real creation of the universe was done by a real creator.  Then I heard back from readers who were obviously not pleased with the creator we have.  Perhaps this creator has been too hard on them. Maybe they feel like baseball players stepping to the plate, only to get too many fastballs thrown at their heads by God.

The funny thing is this – I also get a lot of fastballs as well as curveballs  thrown at my head by God.  I wish he would just thrown more big fat pitches down the middle of the plate, so I would hit more home runs.  As it is, I can’t remember the last time I hit any home run. When I step to the plate awaiting God’s next pitch, I feel like ducking before he even releases the ball.  Clearly, God is no genie slavishly ready to grant me my wishes any time soon.

If I can be allowed to extend my analogue of baseball to a creator, let me say that I became a baseball fan at the time that New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel put together what is often believed to be the greatest baseball team of all time.  Truly, Casey Stengel’s Yankee team was the baseball equivalent of divine force.

Stengel also had a relief pitcher who did what the creator does to me – Duren threw a lot baseballs at people’s heads. Otherwise, on the playing field, Duren wasn’t much of a productive performer.  His eyeglasses were so thick that it was often wondered whether he could see the strike zone at all.  Duran staggered a bit on the mound, too, which he later revealed to have been a problem of his whiskey drinking.

Duren actually wasn’t the worst player on this greatest of all teams.  The worst Yankee player was then a man named “Marvelous Marv”  Throneberry.  Throneberry insisted on imitating all the muscular poses of Mickey Mantle, even when a ball was rolling between his legs into the outfield.  In fact, Marvelous may have been the worst major league player to have ever played as long as he did.

Casey Stengel – managing his team with a higher calculus than simply filling his roster with the best players he could get – liked players like Duren and Throneberry because they kept his Yankees smiling.  Stengel’s smiling Yankees  — the smiling Mickey Mantle, the smiling White Ford, the smiling Yogi Berra, etc. — won World Series after World Series as it has never been done since.  Maybe no other team had players quite as ridiculous as Duren and Marvelous.  The purely logical baseball teams never went as far because in their unsmiling manner they tried too hard, stressed too hard and tied themselves into knots in mirthless tension.

But for old Casey, the existence of some real stupidity on the Yankees including his own wild antics gave him a winning balance that was not apparent at face value.

So this return to the subject of intelligent design is particularly for God Objectors who pointed out that anyone who created something as dumb and as useless as a human appendix should not be awarded the title of intelligent designer. It is true that God’s gift of an appendix has been a great laughing point for the God Objectors.  But in recent years, even the appendix has been discovered to stimulate the reproduction of friendly bacteria that consume stomach toxins.  As old Casey told us in his insertion of players like Duren and Marvelous among his great Yankees, even the worst players when used correctly can have a role in the winning scheme of things.

Here again are some segments from my last disturbing report on the subject of intelligent design, which I am cutting cut short because of my homage here to the intelligently-designed New York Yankees of Casey Stengel:

What I wrote last year

So I don’t ask everyone to agree with me – that would create a less ornately- designed world. But I would like more people to understand why I feel there is more intelligent design going on than just accidents that keep on giving. I would also like to give this much-talked about issue of creative design my own Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning tests. 

Scientifically, any creation is linked to a creator, and the creation of life and the universe is minutely balanced and equate like a good salad. All of this is reassuring to anyone who believes that the superb performance of DNA and the four physical forces of the atom are replicated in the best possible reasons for us someday giving up our physical bodies instead just slowly growing older and more decrepit into eternity.

Like many people, I was more interested in these basic issues of life and death when I was younger. As you grow older you find that no one else can answer these questions for you.  The secular philosophers are there if you need them, but they were mostly male bachelors who wrote the kind of books that demonstrated how much time they had on their hands.  Truly, Plato and Kant and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and Sartre were not simply men who never married, but confirmed male bachelors who never had to change a diaper.  No wonder they thought that life was easy enough to be explained by a home-made world philosophy.

You can probably detect that I have at a younger period in my life read a large portions of the philosophy from these old bachelors.  It seemed to even define them as men, because secular philosophy has never been of much interest to the great women of the world.  But if you have ever had a family where you have a confirmed bachelor uncle who visits you on Thanksgiving but doesn’t bring any gift of food to the table – and instead offers answers to what everything is all about – you would understand that occasionally in their chatterbox musings they say something of value.

And so it happened to me that the 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – old Uncle Arthur – wrote just one paragraph that helped turn me into a more confident theist.  Scientific endeavors, he wrote, are only as strong as their successful imitation of nature.

So I am left with the conclusion that nature is the real creative genius in town, and science is only its plodding imitator.

Now I am here writing these sentences on a computerized system that uses a binary computer language from negative and positive electrical charges. This system would have never been possible if we had never imitated the binary language of DNA codes.  In DNA, we found the majestic foreshadowing of computerized artificial intelligence with bonded thymine and adenine amino acids responding to the bonded acids guanine and cytosine for everything going on in us.

The 15 minutes I’ve budgeted myself to write this commentary will not be enough to settle a debate that has been going on since mankind was introduced to the words, “The Garden of Eden.”  But surely there is no dialogue worthier of enrichment and certainly there is no better nor more civilized place to enrich this debate than in our various schools.

Chris Sharp- Commentary 

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.