A few years ago, in the middle of a week-long debate I was having with the poster locdog about intelligent design, I dreamed that an angel came to visit me and took locdog's side in the dispute. The angel might have been real.

I realize that it sounds like I'm using a cheesy literary device, but I assure you that it's not. I really had this dream, and to this day I'm not sure if the angel was real.

My strongest and last argument in the debate (I thought) was a version of the "blind salamander" argument made by Hitchens.

Where, I demanded to know, did the whales fit in? Their evolutionary path took them out of the ocean only to return to it, and gave them legs only to turn them back into flippers. Where's the "design" in sending a giant land mammal back into a medium that it can no longer breathe? Why not just design a giant fish with a proper set of gills in the first place?

The angel was silent for a moment. I pressed him. "If there's a plan, why do whales have lungs? Why design an animal that lives in the water but has to breathe the air? What was the plan?"

That was, at the time, the cleverest argument I could think of. I didn't have an answer to it. So what happened next makes me wonder, to this day, if the angel was somehow real.

The angel's eyes met mine, and they were filled with a vast and unexpected pity for me. His answer was patient and sad, the tone a parent might take with a heartbreakingly slow child.

"How else could they sing?"

Why do they have to sing in water?

...of the fact that many fishes have the ability to produce sounds, even though they lack lungs and don't breathe air.

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I had a friend in graduate school who had made a career out of cataloging and explaining sounds made by catfish and other freshwater fishes.

Also, at least some of the whales who vocalize do so without passing air out of the body.

That does sound like a cheesy literary device.

I wonder how this literary device would taste grated over spaghetti?

Well, the Big Mouth Billy Bass can sing.

Aesthetics. I got the impression in the dream that I had touched a particular nerve, by inadvertently calling the most beautiful thing in the world's oceans the most conspicuous mistake.

But because this really *is* a dream I had, I can't answer your question except by guessing.

It's awful. So awful, in fact, that I probably should have been a lot less forthcoming about where I got that argument from. I should have just presented it as a "devil's advocate" (particularly since I don't know if I believe it anyway) and pretended I'd come up with it on my own.

Which I might have, subconsciously. And if I didn't, then I'll let whatever talked to me construct its own apologetics.

Scoot'r-d:

Why do they have to sing in water?

For one thing, because they can't live on land.

I'm not a fan of the Intelligent Design crowd, but I do think that they're missing out on a general theme of argument that they ought to be using more. If one hypothesizes an external, overarching designer guiding the evolutionary paths taken by different species, then it seems consistent to posit that such a designer might be shaping those paths to fit an external, overarching purpose of its own.

If there's a designer, then maybe all those flightless birds and aquatic mammals (and aquatic birds, and flying mammals) are meant to teach us something.

Hypothetically, I can think of at least one lesson a designer might be trying to illustrate for us with these lizards. . . and it's a lesson that would be of particular value to people like Christopher Hitchens.

They lived on land at one time. Why did they have to go back into the sea to sing? Sound carries further in water, maybe that's it. They were having trouble locating mates while land bound creatures. Those that hung out singing at the beach got more babes so they made more like themselves. They had no idea that the water propagated sound waves further than air but it saved their species from extinction and it explains this mans dream too. Go figure.

A little humility is a good thing.

!

. . . this place has truly gone to hell, but it's good to see you.