Taranto Unintelligently Disses Design

In another throwaway line that displays his cultural, rather than intellectual, contempt for serious theists, James Taranto has again offered a trivial rejection of intelligent design.

Offering a humorous review of the wonderful movie The March of the Penguins, Taranto, on his way to insulting the intelligence of the Kerry campaign, opines that an intelligent designer would not have created penguins with their awkward process of protecting their eggs while barely managing to feed themselves.

SWNID tires of pointing out the obvious, but this issue is important enough that it cannot rest. But in hopes of being heard, we will turn up the volume on our amplifier to 11:

IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE KIND OF DESIGN THAT THE DESIGNER WANTS.

This obvious observation is what negates Taranto's remark that if there is a designer, he's Rube Goldberg.

If a designer wants efficiency, ease and safety, he would design something rather unlike the penguin, at least as far as procreation is concerned (for swimming and hunting in icy waters, the penguin passes the test easily). Goldberg's humor rested on the contrast between the simplicity of the tasks his machines accomplished and the absurd complexity of the means of accomplishing them. The assumed efficiency as the objective of every design.

But what if this designer wanted something different, something emphasizing other qualities besides efficiency? Say, resourcefulness, adaptability, determination, courage, devotion, pluck?

But, Taranto might offer, assigning such qualities to animals is a matter of personification. Penguins are not resourceful. They all do the very same thing. It's part of being a penguin. People are resourceful.

Agreed. But penguins are eminently amenable of personification. More explicitly, they offer something human observers find significant. As Taranto himself observes in the premise of his essay, they make a good movie--but for humans to watch, not other penguins.

So what if the world and all that is in it is designed by an intelligent designer with humanity as its objective? And what if the objective for humanity is virtue, with its end the seeking of the Designer himself? Might it look rather like a place where French guys can suffer frostbite while filming flightless birds procreating and make millions of people think about life, the universe and everything? Might the design, among other things, provoke the human observer to reflect on the nature and meaning of his or her own existence?

That at least explains why the whole world loves this movie, something that Darwin still puzzles over.