The Slartibartfast Principle

From Wired:

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race.

If it is conceivable, just 57 years after the identification of DNA's structure, for a Canadian poet to imprint his poetry into the DNA of a living organism then isn't it probable that an intelligent designer in the past would have had similar desires and perforce much greater abilities to accomplish the task?

Thus the evidence for intelligent design ought to be readily available in the graffiti of DNA. "Slartibartfast was here," or perhaps "3.14159265," or given what we know of economics, "All rights reserved, MegaCorp. Call for a free estimate."

The fact that we have not found such evidence reduces my belief in intelligent design, although I am not against more investigation.  Indeed, one of the few arguments for god that I have ever given much credence to was the putative discovery of codes predicting future events in the Bible.  A serious paper on this topic was published in Statistical Science in 1994.  The paper was later convincingly rebutted but I still think it was the best evidence ever presented for an intelligent designer. 

Addendum One: Interestingly one of the few people who thought as I did, although coming from a quite different direction, was Nobel prize winner Robert Aumann who early on supported the Bible codes research.  However, after further research, supervised by Aumann, concluded that the paper could not be replicated Aumann returned to his prior view that the codes were improbable.  It's unclear what, if anything, would further shift his prior.

Addendum Two: Steven Landsburg was here yesterday and at lunch suggested that perhaps the great designer's name was in fact 3.14159265…

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