Bob Sather
Posts: 1
Joined: Jan. 2006
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An Alternative to Intelligent Design
As noted by Judge Jones in the Kitzmiller case, Intelligent Design proponents set up a “false dichotomy” between evolution and ID: any putative flaw in evolutionary theory is taken to be evidence for ID. Their dichotomy is persuasive because there is no obvious third alternative.
I want to propose an alternative to both ID and evolution. My theory is called Progenitor Time Travel. This theory (“PTT”) proposes that there are eddies in the space-time continuum that occasionally throw individual creatures back in time. So, for example, the rotary flagellum on bacteria is easily explained: at some time, an existing bacterium (with such a flagellum) was cast backward in time, to a time just before such bacteria existed. It reproduced, and became the progenitor of all such bacteria, including its own future self.
For more complex organisms, such as pandas, the time-travelling individual must be a pregnant female.
Don’t dismiss PTT as ridiculous. It has a lot going for it. For one thing, it is more believable than ID. Consider:
• ID posits a super-intelligent, possibly omnipotent Creator, similar to the Christian God. Such a creator is almost certainly trans-temporal, i.e. capable of time-travel. So believing in ID requires one to believe in the possibility of time-travel, and a lot more besides. PTT is easier: it requires you to believe just in time-travel, and not the rest of the ID baggage.
• As Judge Jones points out, people familiar with our culture’s long traditions about a divine God find it far easier to believe ID. Similarly, our culture has a long literary canon describing time travel, from H G Wells to Audrey Niffenegger. This makes time travel comprehensible, the first step to belief.
• Modern physics describes time as a dimension, like a spatial dimension. Time is flexible and complex. Physics even includes anti-particles which move backward in time. Why shouldn’t inadvertent time travel be a possibility?
So PTT is a believable theory, an alternative to ID, and no less verifiable (that is, not at all.) I haven’t succeeded in observing any examples of PTT occurring yet, but I have an active research program: I read books and articles about ID, then I adopt all the “evidence” for ID as evidence for PTT as well. Every time I hear of a gap in evolutionary theory, or someone supports the Theory of Irreducible Complexity, I take that to be an affirmation of Progenitor Time Travel, as the only possible explanation! (Well, one of two explanations...)
Bob Sather
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