I Should Have Designed You More Intelligently

A CJSD guest editorial by Yahweh

This week, the Kansas Board of Education decided to openly question the Darwinian theory of evolution. It’s one of many battles taking place in America, as a vocal group of Christians seek to push creationism into science classes. They believe that it is wrong to teach children anything that might contradict what’s written in the book of Genesis.

While many have been shocked by these developments, I knew this would happen from Day One. I hoped it wouldn’t. I hoped that maybe, just once, I would be wrong. I would have prayed, except that’s like talking to myself. But it has come to pass. In the end, I can’t blame you. The buck, as they say, stops here. I should have designed you more intelligently.

So I’m here to set the record straight.

When I first started speaking to the ancient Hebrews, telling them how the world began, I was trying to not freak them out. They were a simple people—herding goats, picking berries, and sending soldiers into battle to die so they could sleep with their wives. They weren’t ready to hear about the Big Bang, quantum physics, atoms, amino acids, and chemical reactions. Remember, I had to tell them what to eat so they wouldn’t get food poisoning. Explaining how humans were the end result of billions of years of genetic mutations and natural selection would have confused the heck out of them and sent them running toward the nearest golden calf.

Instead, I gave them the Cliff’s Notes. Over the course of creating the universe, I had some down time, polishing nebulae, adding salt to the oceans, putting bacteria in the Petri dish you call Earth. That’s the unsexy, blue collar side of being a deity, and it makes for boring reading. However, if I touched on the main points but said it took billions of years, I would sound like a pretty lazy God. So I condensed the timeline, too, editing out the tinkering and tweaking to create a six-day creation highlight reel. I knew that, when the time was right, scientists like Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein would start to figure things out and work in the details.

What I didn’t count on was how powerful I made stupid. The secret to creating a successful universe is balance. Everything needs an opposite to keep things in check: good and evil, protons and electrons, arousal and marriage. When I created intelligence, I naturally created stupidity, because intelligence without stupidity tends to make people snooty and obnoxious.

Intelligence, however, is like the cheetah. It’s very fast, very powerful, and very impressive, but at the same time, it needs just the right environment to survive and thrive. Stupidity is like the roach, powerless in isolation, but resistant to change and able to breed at a phenomenal rate. The worse the conditions, the faster it spreads.

What’s happening now is that some of my followers are clear-cutting the intelligence cheetah’s habitat, driving it toward the seas and a few college towns in between. Meanwhile, the roaches of stupidity are not only breeding, they are walking upright, running for office, and making appearances on cable news shows.

What I’m trying to say is, on the one hand, I’m flattered that you’ve invited me back into the classroom. I had hoped that as you discovered the mysteries of the universe, you would recognize my little touches—DNA, quarks and neutrinos, female orgasm. I was a bit miffed by the whole “God is dead” thing, and maybe that’s why I’ve kept silent for so long while this was occurring.

But enough is enough. The Bible is not the creation handbook. If the Old Testament writers had gotten the story perfect, I wouldn’t have had to send junior down to clean things up.

Use the sense I gave you, for crying out loud. The fossil record, the carbon dating, the movement from simpler to more complex creatures— I’ve dropped more clues than an Encyclopedia Brown story. All that evidence is a message from me: you may be in my image now, but you sure didn’t start out that way.