Kurt Vonnegut: Secular Humanist and Believer in Intelligent Design

Back in my early-twenties, fresh out of college, lots of time on my hands as a substitute teacher whose duties were usually little more than functioning as a $30-a-day babysitter for junior high and senior high students, I went through a major fiction-reading stage. I hadn't previously read much fiction beyond that which had been required of me in school, preferring to read history and biography.

But I concluded that I needed to enrich my intellectual palette a bit by reading fiction. In my typically obsessive way, I couldn't hopscotch around the novels at my local library or bookstore. I had to focus on specific authors.

So, I read three or four books by Hermann Hesse.

Next, I tackled Kurt Vonnegut. I got a charge out of Vonnegut at the time, particularly his Breakfast of Champions, built around what was then to me, an intriguing and unknown literary device: The author inserted himself into the story, acting as a sort of God to a character from one of his previous novels, the former pornographer Kilgore Trout, changing the course of Trout's life in the hope that he could also change his own.

Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as a fiftieth birthday present to himself, punctuated by his futile desire to be young again. (It's funny for me to think of myself as now being two years older than Vonnegut was when he wrote that book!)

In any case, what came through his corpus was that Vonnegut was, in fact, what has come to be called a "secular humanist." Yet, in this interview excerpt presented by one of my favorite bloggers, Annie Gottlieb, Ambivablog, we see that Vonnegut is a secular humanist who believes in intelligent design:

MR. VONNEGUT: [ . . . L]ook, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.

Vonnegut's position puts an entirely different spin on the whole discussion of ID, restoring it in fact to the status it enjoyed before being embraced as a stalking horse by some Creationists. Back then, scientists of both theistic and atheistic bents met at conferences to discuss the possibility and implications of an intelligent design and how it came to be.

Vonnegut's observation is simple and worthy of exploration: Can the doctrine of natural selection possibly explain the elegant panoply of life? I don't think that it can be and neither, apparently, does Vonnegut. But for me, that leads quite neatly and convincingly to "the God Hypothesis." I wonder where it might lead someone like Vonnegut once scientists really explored the notion?

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