Wearing the Unfashionable William Paley

I'll come out and admit it. I've never been much for changing cultural fashions. It took me until the 80s to get interested in disco, and I'm just now starting to get into grunge. Perhaps there is a bit of a rebel in me, but it is just as the wave of fashion moves on that I tend to get interested.

I thought of this as I read gaga's rather disappointing response to a legitimate question. The context was the threaded discussion of my post "Is Evil a Disproof for Christianity?" After I acknowledged the staggering encyclopedia of information contained in the human genome as evidence for God's handiwork, gaga responded as follows:

I don't know therefore goddidit. Oh Great. *headdesk*

Er, okay? Oh, right, that's unfashionable, like asking a metrosexual to wear cut offs.

But like I said, I'm not swayed by trivial changes in fashion. So then I came back with this:

Say you were lucky enough to be among the astronauts on the first manned (or personed) mission to Mars. You come across a rock that looks like it has etchings like the Rosetta stone but much more elaborate. In fact, you actually find several thousand of these stones with these elaborate etchings. Would you conclude that this was the result of blind processes or intelligence? Would the latter hypothesis somehow be a "cheat" and if so then why?

It seems obvious to me that we would conclude the stones had been etched by an intelligent cause. It also seemed to me that if it is reasonable to infer this (even when we cannot yet interpret the information), it is that much more reasonable to infer a directing intelligence behind the genome (where we can interpret much of the information).

Perhaps gaga, like others, is already committed to playing a game: let's see how much we can explain through random, undirected processes alone. But whether or not one finds that a game worth playing, given what we presently know about the world, and particularly about the fact that massive amounts of information do not arise through random processes, it seemed the most likely explanation was an intelligent one.

This was too much for gaga who responded by carrying on the theme of incredulity to fashion violation:

I can't believe it. Did you just resort to channeling Paley?
*picks up jaw from the floor*

Um, well yes. But like I said, I am not really swayed by fashions, intellectual or otherwise. Keynes may not be trendy at the Heritage Foundation, but if I agree with him, I'll wear his ideas proudly.  

And so it is with William Paley. Some think it is a crime against good fashion to mention Paley in the company of scientists, rather like wearing your deep blue, skin tight Jordache jeans to freshman orientation. But I say if the jeans fit, wear 'em. Even if there is a big "Paley" stitched into the back pocket.