Intelligent design

I was talking to Oliver Morton yesterday and he had just heard from Francis Crick’s biographer some hot news about molybdenum, which is essential to life, and was very scarce for about a billion years after the earth’s atmosphere filled up with oxygen. This has some consequences for the theory of directed panspermia, in which Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel were interested — the idea that life on earth was seeded from other planets, possibly by an alien race of entirely different chemistry. As Oliver pointed out, this is entirely ocmpatible with Behe-type intelligent design. But that proves something very important about ID, which is that it won’t serve the theological purposes it’s designed to do: no theory could entail the existence of God if it had the imprimatur of Francis Crick, who once proposed turning King’s College chapel into a swimming pool.