A parable about Intelligent Design.
I used to work a lot in theater. A *lot*. And it's funny how the audience thinks that everything that happens on stage is exactly how it was planned to be. You do theater for any length of time, and you know it's simply not the case.
Two examples from the same show. A set that had to be assembled and disassembled every night had an old mantle clock on it as set decoration. One night, just as someone is mentioning that it's getting late and about time to go, the clock started striking. It had been jostled enough that the pendulum started swinging. Fortunately the clock struck eight times ... just about appropriate for the time of night.
Second example ... a partially drunk, recorked bottle of Irish stout (root beer, in fact) is set on the mantle while two actors sit at a table. Under the stage lights, pressure builds in the bottle, and just as one actor stands the cork flies into the air with a POP! The actor, with supreme presence of mind, looks at it, follows the trajectory, puts out his hand, and catches the cork.
What does this have to do with ID? After the show while talking to audience members, we had to convince them that these were just coincidences. While they appeared to be planned and designed (they fit the nature of the play exactly), they were nothing more than random occurances. They simply could not believe we hadn't planned the cork gag.
Third example ... if you've never known the terror of "going up" on stage, count yourself lucky. In one show I was in, an actor completely forgot his next line, looked thoughtfully skyward, walked around the set introspectively, sat for a moment, fiddled with stuff on the desk ... and then remembered the line and continued. He was afterwards complemented by an audience member who found his portrayal of angst at that moment to be very moving and a wonderful job of acting (when in fact he was just in terror, his mind racing to try to remember a line).
An audience who sees a finished product, and who is disposed to think that everything they see was meticulously planned will assume that everything is designed to happen a particular way. 'Taint so.
Just another annoying pebble to toss into the brain-shoe. No claim of proof, just something to think about.
- Timothy
