The absurdity of creation — a cosmic joke with too many species

1. Creation by decree: “Let there be… billions of species?”

Perhaps you remember sitting in Sunday school, watching your teacher explain the creation story on a felt board. They’d stick up some cute little felt pictures of birds, fish, trees, and maybe a giraffe or two, all in vibrant colors. It seemed so reasonable, so doable, right? On day one, God made light — plop, up goes a yellow felt sun. On day five, He created the fish — plop, a blue felt fish swims onto the board. Easy peasy.

But let’s pause for a moment. What if we were to really represent every species God allegedly created on that felt board? What if, instead of a handful of fish and birds, we added an image for every single species that exists and has ever existed? Even better, let’s say we use little 1x1 inch felt squares for each species. How big would our felt board have to be?

Brace yourself — our felt board would need to be so large that it would dwarf the Earth itself. There are an estimated 8.7 million species alive today, but that’s just a fraction of all the species that have ever existed. With billions of extinct species thrown in, our felt board would need to cover an area larger than the entire planet! The absurdity of creation starts to become clear when you realize that the creation story, as told on that sweet little felt board, could never capture the mind-boggling scale, diversity and complexity of life.

So, if God had really spoken everything into existence, He would’ve needed to do a lot more talking than the creation story lets on. Maybe He needed a cosmic megaphone to announce, “Let there be 300,000 species of beetles!” The poor Sunday school teacher would’ve had a meltdown trying to fit all of that on the felt board!

2. Life in extreme environments: creating species in impossible places

And now let’s venture into the truly mind-boggling world of extremophiles — species that thrive in the most inhospitable places on Earth. Does the idea of God crafting creatures to live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the pressure is so intense they’d explode if you brought them to the surface, sound like part of a grand design? Does God take strolls at the bottom of the ocean, making sure these giant tube worms are surviving around hydrothermal vents?

Then there are bacteria that thrive in environments where you’d expect nothing but death — acidic lakes, toxic mud, or miles beneath the Earth’s surface. What’s the divine logic here? Is God operating as some kind of cosmic microsurgeon, delicately crafting bacteria to live in environments so extreme that even He might need special equipment to visit them?

Is He setting up a new challenge for Himself with every species He creates — “Let’s see if I can make a fish survive without light!” It’s as if God’s creative process went from “Let there be life!” to “Let there be something completely absurd and impossible to explain rationally.”

3. Parasites, fungi, and cruel designs: a masterpiece of cosmic cruelty

Brace yourselves for the gory side of nature, where the designs get downright cruel. Let’s start with the parasitoid wasp — a creature that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar. As the larvae hatch, they slowly consume the poor host from the inside out. How’s that for a thoughtful design? And what about the fungus that infects ants, takes over their minds, and forces them to climb high above the ground, only to kill them and use their bodies as a launchpad to spread more spores? Sounds more like a cosmic horror movie than a divine plan, doesn’t it?

Even the seemingly peaceful world of coral reefs is a battlefield. While we enjoy the beauty of corals in the daytime, at night, coral polyps extend their tentacles and wage silent wars for space, stinging and digesting their rivals. These beautiful underwater worlds are anything but peaceful — they are war zones!

Oh, and let’s not forget our closest relatives, the chimps. While we imagine primates peacefully swinging from trees, chimpanzee society is rife with violence. Rival groups attack each other in brutal turf wars, and infanticide is disturbingly common. Is this the result of a loving creator, or just nature in all its raw brutality?

4. Fossils: God’s scrap pile of failed projects

Ah, the fossil record. If there’s anything that throws a wrench into the idea of a perfect creation, it’s the millions of species that existed long before humans and then promptly went extinct. It’s as if God spent a few billion years prototyping and just couldn’t get things right.

The trilobites? Great idea, but nope — scrapped. The dinosaurs? Fun, but too rowdy — extinct. The list of discarded species goes on and on, like a cosmic junkyard full of God’s failed experiments. Is this what we’re supposed to believe was part of the plan?

Now, some apologists like to throw in the Flood to explain away the fossil record. According to this story, all those fossils are the remnants of life wiped out during Noah’s deluge. But here’s the real kicker — if the Flood was responsible, why do so many of these extinct species bear no resemblance to the life forms that supposedly survived the flood? Was there a celestial selection committee deciding who got onto the ark? Were trilobites not cute enough? Was God a little too attached to mosquitoes, but not so much to T. rex?

It seems that instead of one grand design, we have a cosmic audition, and many species didn’t make the cut.

5. Nature’s forces at play: a designer’s nightmare

Let’s consider the sheer range of forces of nature that life has evolved to harness in ways so clever and unexpected that it would leave any designer baffled. Magnetism, for instance — who could have imagined that the magnetotactic bacteria would evolve to align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field? Or take electricity — the electric eel generates electric shocks powerful enough to stun prey and predators alike. Did God sit down one day and think, “You know what this creation needs? A fish that can electrocute its enemies”?

Then there’s light itself, not just used for vision, but for all sorts of wild applications. The mantis shrimp can see colors we can’t even imagine, detecting a broader spectrum of light than humans, while deep-sea fish use bioluminescence to attract prey. And what about species that use pheromones to communicate across vast distances, signaling everything from territory to mating? What sort of blueprints did God allegedly have when designing these biochemical signaling systems?

Species have evolved to utilize echolocation like bats and dolphins, turning sound into a precision-guided radar system. Others use electrostatic force to cling to walls, like a gecko’s sticky feet. Flying fish? Birds that dive underwater to catch prey? Frogs that walk on water?

If a designer really had a hand in this, then it’s one of the most chaotic, random, and scattershot design jobs in history. But the truth is, life finds its way by trial and error, with each species taking what it can from the natural world to survive and thrive.

But perhaps one of the most counterintuitive designs in nature is shark skin. If you were a designer sitting down to sketch out a fast fish, your first instinct would probably be to make it smooth — after all, smooth surfaces should reduce friction in water, right? But evolution had other ideas. Shark skin is covered in tiny dermal denticles — tooth-like structures that create micro-turbulence in the water. This turbulence actually reduces drag and makes the shark swim faster.

If a designer were tasked with coming up with this, how long would it take to figure out that rough skin works better than smooth? It would require testing millions of surface textures in water, carefully measuring friction, and observing how each change affected the shark’s speed. After countless failed prototypes and a frustrating trial-and-error process, maybe, just maybe, the designer would stumble upon the idea of creating turbulence to improve speed. Meanwhile, nature’s evolutionary process quietly arrived at this solution over millions of years.

This design is not something a brilliant mind would come up with on a whim — it’s too subtle, too counterintuitive. Instead of saying, “It’s a fish, let’s give it smooth scales,” nature went in a completely unexpected direction. The end result is a perfect adaptation for the shark’s environment, but not one that fits the simple-minded approach of intelligent design.

And here’s the kicker: in all this creativity, anti-gravity hasn’t made the cut. If anti-gravity were a thing, wouldn’t some clever species have evolved to use it by now? The absence of such a force in nature’s vast playbook is more evidence that nature, not some all-knowing designer, determines what works and what doesn’t.

In the end, when you consider the astonishing array of natural forces that species have evolved to use in ingenious ways, it becomes laughable to think that a being just designed all of this in a creation spree or simply “spoke it into being.”

6. Species with extreme life cycles: playing the long game?

Then there are species with ridiculously long life cycles or ones that seem to depend on completely random events. Take the bristlecone pine, which lives for more than 5,000 years — what’s the divine plan here? Does God just really love long-lived trees? Or maybe He’s planning ahead for the next few millennia, thinking, “Let’s create something that’ll stick around for a while, just in case.”

And how about species like the periodical cicada, which spends 17 years underground before emerging just to mate and die? Or the fire lily, whose seeds can lie dormant for years, waiting for a wildfire to trigger their growth. What kind of grand design is this? It’s more like cosmic procrastination.

Does God have a calendar somewhere, marking when each of these species is supposed to wake up? “Okay, it’s been 17 years, time for the cicadas!” It’s absurd to think that such specific and bizarre life cycles were part of a carefully planned creation. These species are more like random accidents of nature, waiting for the right moment to make their brief appearance in the spotlight.

Conclusion: creation by divine decree? more like cosmic comedy

The idea that a brilliant mind created the sheer diversity of species, the complexity of ecosystems, and the bizarre life forms we see today is, quite frankly, a cosmic joke. No single being could possibly design something so mind-bogglingly complex, let alone do it by simply speaking everything into existence.

If creation was a project, it would go down in history as the most chaotic, poorly managed one of all time. The fossil record alone looks like the aftermath of a failed group project, with each contributor trying and failing to make sense of their own mess. And the delicate balance of ecosystems? That’s just nature winging it, hoping nothing tips the scales.

In the end, creation isn’t the work of an intelligent designer — it’s the result of billions of years of chaotic trial and error, with species, ecosystems, and life cycles that are as absurd as they are fascinating.