As characters within this story ourselves, we have not yet read every page or understood every plot twist, but through science, we have learned a great deal regarding the unfolding of the events within it. There is so much to be learned from this story, including an understanding of our own origins. I for one, and I know many others as well, are continually astonished by the eloquence of each sentence. Sometimes we are overwhelmed with the beautiful poetry, and other times amazed at the harsh violence of the prose. Sadly, there are important aspects of this story that many people are stubbornly unwilling to accept, such as the fact that it was not penned by any intelligent being. There is no intent within the phrases that describe life. And the only morals we might glean from it are those we choose to attribute to it externally, from our perspective, though the story itself is entirely morally neutral. It may also be tempting to place ourselves as the lead characters, but we are not. We are not the climax of the story, nor are we the protagonists (or antagonists). No character, that is, no species is any more integral to the Great Story than any other.
Some of those who insist on clinging to these misconceptions do so by invoking a literary shortcut, the deus ex machina. This is a Latin phrase, which translates to "God of the machines." It is a derisive term used to describe a particular tool that a lazy or unimaginative author might use to resolve the story's conflict with coincidence and absurdity rather than by the reasoning or resources of the characters. It originated within Greek tragedies, which would sometimes use machines like pulleys to lower an actor portraying God down onto the stage, who would thus intervene in a way that resolves the apparently insurmountable problems facing the protagonist. The use of such a plot device quickly became frowned upon for its absurdity and its unsatisfying solution that could be used for any problem, while utterly lacking in cleverness and requiring no thought from the author. Perhaps even more importantly, the deus ex machina solution does not follow with the logic of the rest of the story, but arises as some external force, making it not a resolution at all, but a resignation.
Although no evidence suggests that any intelligence had a hand in the creation or diversification of life, there is a movement among the ranks of the religious right to undermine science and insert a deity into the awe inspiring epic tale our planet is telling. Creationism, and the spurious euphemism it sometimes hides behind, "intelligent design," are the religiously indoctrinated persons' attempts to rewrite the Great Story so that it reads like a pathetic attempt at a dollar-bin trash novella. The biggest change they hope to make is to insert the biggest, most absurd deus ex machina of all: god. The irony should not escape us, the most piteous "god of the machine" there is is "god" itself. The Great Story's actual resolutions are the laws of nature, the mechanisms of evolution. Evolution is not only a beautifully simple explanation for the grand complexity of life, it is an inevitability. Replication with variation in a selective environment (which perfectly describes genes) has to result in the increase of replicators better equipped to survive in that selective environment. Their complexity will increase. These are all internal resolutions to the story. "God did it!" is the lazy, unimaginative resignation of a mind infected with the anthropocentric and self-centered values of religious fundamentalism.
Wikipedia's article on deus ex machina tells us that "it does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is often so unlikely that it challenges suspension of disbelief, allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, though more palatable, ending." There is no more a fitting example of a deus ex machina than the insertion of "god" into the great story of life.
"The Trinity is a feeble glimmer next to the glory of the Calculus, Genesis is a short, limping, clumsy limerick next to the epic poetry of Evolution." -P.Z. Myers, from a blog entry posted after I had started this one, but before I had posted it. If I were superstitious, I might be able to make the claim of being on the same wavelength, or some such nonsense(!)
