Succinct Rebuttal Theater, Episode 1

I do not Tweet, chiefly because I cannot square it with my guiding tenet question, “What Would Abraham Lincoln Do?” While the Gettysburg Address contains about two hundred eighty words, by one hundred forty characters we have not yet reached “equality.” In fact, we haven’t even noticed the War.

At the same time, though, I’m attracted to the idea of word limits. I have a tendency to go on, particularly when I have nothing to say. I suppose I keep thinking I’ll find something. The discipline imposed by a solid ceiling has its attractions, and the G.A. shows the power that can be generated by just ten sentences.

Thus today’s exercise, the first episode of Succinct Rebuttal Theater. The idea is to propose a claim (not patently absurd, for the sake of fairness) and then to craft a solid and meaningful rebuttal in the space of fewer than two hundred words. Who knows? Development of skills for the task might eventually prove useful on message boards, at picket lines, or in church.

Topic: Evolution

Claim: “Human life is too complex to have evolved by chance. How could everything about Earth and biology just happen to be so perfect for us?”

Succinct Rebuttal: Think about your family tree: generation after generation of people meeting, mating, and raising children to do the same in their turn, all of it leading to you. Take away just one of those people and your unique particularity disappears. One accident, one missed acquaintance, one worse disease, one misplaced sperm in umpteen thousand years and your place in genealogy would be occupied by somebody else. It stands to reason, then, that every choice and action made by all those countless ancestors must have involved not chance or choice but predetermined intelligent design. Otherwise, the odds against you existing at all are simply astronomical.

But of course it isn’t that way, is it? You exist at the foot of your family tree by chance, not choice. You’re what came of those events and possibilities, just as human life is what resulted from the mutations, selections, and behaviors of a billion years. Given what we know of the robustness of life, the likelihood of humanity occurring (or something like humanity, which we would call humanity if we were it) is actually rather good. The universe is very large. The odds are astronomical, but only because there burn so many stars.