Guilt, in many forms

There is a debate, ongoing, apparently. You’ve probably come across it; It relates to all things, in as much as whether they exist through an unlikely series of fortunate shakes of a long chain of genetic dice or the particular and specific plan of a divine being.

There are many people who are happy to accept that both are true and many more that passionately take one side or the other, and probably a good chunk of people who neither know, care, or are still reading.

Damn.

The thing is though, I’m happy to leave the wider debate about the existence of peoples imaginary friends un-touched, but I have breaking news about the specifics of the creation-of-all-things quandary.

Evolution, as the heathens call it, suggests that life, in all its forms, tries to adapt. It makes mistakes, and abandons them, and through complex, but ultimately uncontrolled processes, makes improvements.

Intelligent Design says that a supreme intelligence directs things, and there is an ineffable end point in mind.

I can happily blast one of these competing theories out of the water, using the magic of my phone. We’ll ignore for a moment the fact that design requires intent, and intent implies at least a base level of intelligence; I assume just saying Design isn’t the right sort of pithy.

I don’t have to use my phone; the Nintendo Wii would do fine. I could probably use a carton of 5-Alive juice, similar to the one I had with my lunch.

I like my phone though, and it seems reasonable that it act as my foil in this scenario.

The device in question is a Motorola Atrix. It is quite lovely, and comes with a bewilderingly nice bunch of accessories. These, I have a strong suspicion, were designed, rather than spewed out of some complex production line by accident. I’m not suggestion that they were put in place by an infallible supreme being; i like my phone, but I’m not taking it as evidence of divinity.

Thing is, the accessory pack that they gave me includes a cradle, that allows you to hook up your phone to your HDTV, and use it as either a very big phone, a film watching device, picture viewer etc etc, or a web browser. It has Bluetooth keyboard and mouse goodness, to assist.

The phone itself has DLNA though, which makes most of the functions redundant. Assuming you don’t have a need for your TV to act as a big screen for making phone calls, which you’d assumedly use a Bluetooth headset to take (and I assume no-one needs that), then it lets you use your HDTV as a web browser. Good design and cleverness aside, if you’re the sort of gadget-idiot that buys one of these, chance are you have bigger, better web-browsing tools, such as, say, a computer. With HDMI out, I imagine.

Design is all very well, but it is a product of intelligence as a matter of course. It doesn’t require us to make a prefix of it. It is conceivable that a single designer came up with a selection of features that seemed complimentary at the time, but turned out to render each other somewhat redundant, and it is possible, albeit unlikely, that they were all deliberate and everyone is failing to use their devices as intended.

We all know, however, that whether it’s Nintendo, Sony, Motorola, or even Apple, that even intelligent beings can make errors. They aren’t intended, part of the design, but these flaws can be endearing at times, irritating at others.

My belaboured point, after all that rambling, is that an omniscient being would be able to iron out all the design errors, meaning that the products designed would only contain intended features, and thus each end product would not be flawed.

Wow. So many words just to brag about my new phone. So many reasons to feel guilty (blasphemy, buying a new phone, bragging, poor syntax...the list goes on).

Post script: My new phone has allowed me to come online to post this, thus making up for the mistake in my trying to post it three days ago, whilst allowing me to repeat the mistake of sending it out into the world. Great. More guilt.