Those who endorse Intelligent Design — that hotchpotch of Medieval theological hysteria, Neolithic superstition and prehistoric terror — have a fairly ambivalent relationship with dinosaurs. In this respect they have a lot in common with most fauna that lived nervously and died spectacularly 80-million years ago. But while the prospect of being stalked in a swamp by a gargantuan peckish gecko is a sobering one for most modern humans, the Intelligent Designers are uncomfortable for far less imaginative reasons. They dislike dinosaurs because in the grand scheme of sin, salvation, redemption, judgement, apocalypse and ultimately harps, dinosaurs are entirely pointless.
At this juncture the godless cynic is tempted to suggest that this is something else the believers have in common with Jurassic life, but he must pull back before the brink. After all, no one wants to be the target of a middle-class liberal Baptist jihad, with its waves of suicide spinsters, their heads shrouded in doilies and tea cosies, the fermenting bottles of preserves strapped to their bodies clinking sinisterly in the late afternoon heat. No, all that one can truly say about the Intelligent Design crowd is that they are well-meaning blasphemers-by-omission.
Most would insist that their toddler, so lovably sticking a crochet hook up the cat’s nose, is extremely intelligent. Surely it must therefore follow that little Aloysius the Impaler is the intellectual rival of the supreme creator of the Universe, or That Which Created the Creator of the Universe, or That Which Ordained the Spark That Lit the Way of That Which Created the Creator of the Universe, or Larry David, who invented Seinfeld.
Semantics, they might cry. Of course, the Designer is more intelligent than Aloysius, now just about to transform his sister’s cot into incendiary performance art. And yet they cannot call Its methods what they want — Super Duper Gosh-Darned Miraculous Design With Theological Knobs On — because the moment one demonstrates worship, the flimsy appeal to science and logic evaporates.
And so the Designer remains merely Intelligent, doomed to remain as banal as the mortals who name Its works, and robbed of the athletic genuflection and purple-prosed adulation most other deities can expect from their acolytes. Some gods get to be eight-armed destroyers of worlds and ravishers of voluptuous demi-goddesses, riding planet-sized white elephants and shooting bolts of lighting out of their belly buttons. Liberal Christianity’s God gets to engage in snappy, informed conversation, have precocious children who turn into angry environmentalists, and have guilt-ravaged affairs with librarians. If the choice is Intelligent Designer or a trans-dimensional Boswell-Wilkie circus, bring on the juggling bearded lady-gods.
But once again those pesky pre-Cambrians intrude, this time courtesy of the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs, that curious series that managed to obliterate all the fascination and fantasy that draws little boys to the ancient beasts, while simultaneously making up great reams of pseudo-scientific factoids about them (‘She eats mostly truffles, which she digs up with short bursts of ultrasound projected from her left eye. Her favourite colour is blue, and she likes pina coladas and getting caught in the rain.”) The episode in question this week was a rogue’s gallery of vicious sea beasts, entitled The Five Most Dangerous Seas in the World. One awful evolutionary cul-de-sac after another was displayed, varmints comprising little more than armour-plated, portcullis-sized jaws wired directly into brains roughly resembling jelly babies. Their names were Latin and spiky, jagged with fangs and dismembering flippers: all boiled down to permutations of Ocrapithinkitsaurus.
However, it soon became clear that the list of leviathans was incomplete, and that the ultimate argument against intelligent design was going to be ignored. For one creature still exists, a monster so primitive, voracious and utterly pointless, that it renders void any appeal to order and intent in the created world. Psychopathicus Pilferens Crackjunkii, the Somali pirate, developed in the primordial ooze of a downtown Mogadishu puddle before shedding its gills and learning to drive a Toyota 4X4. At last, recognising that it must either get a job or face extinction, it chose suicide and walked back into the sea. But, it was thwarted by the unexpected buoyancy of its malnourished, drugs-ravaged body, and it floated face-up for some months before finally bumping into a British cruise liner. The rest is maritime history.
And we are left where we started, trying to reconcile the Somali pirate with St Peter’s. Did He who made Crackjunkii make thee? And if He did, what the hell was he thinking?