Study Proves Universe Created By Committee

Gestation, Kansas, June 11, 2010 -- The most extensive analysis yet undertaken of the structure and contents of the universe conclusively proves the universe was created not by a single entity, as has been widely suggested, but by "a fractious and disorganized committee or committees given to groupthink and petty infighting", according to Drs. Karl Pootle and Yumble Frick, co-authors of the study. The analysis is expected to have profound implications on the theoretical underpinnings of many popular religions.

The study, entitled “Universe: Made By Whom How?”, was commissioned by an interfaith consortium of world religious leaders seeking to develop a comprehensive scientific foundation for various fundamentally compatible theories of creation, theories that until recently had been little more than matters of faith with no objective scientific underpinning. The Universe Made By Whom How data was intended by its sponsors to be a “Mother of All Bombs” in the ongoing war on evolution, according to Dr. Frick.

“Several major western religions proceed from the assumption that the universe and all it contains were created by some form of very powerful conscious entity who had both a purpose and a plan of some kind in mind,” Dr. Pootle said. “That assumption formed the starting-point of our scientific inquiry. However, as so often happens when you scientifically attempt to prove a theory you assume without objective justification to be fact, the data failed to work in our favor. We were forced to rethink our whole hypothesis. Drawing-board time.”

Rather than verifying, as initially posited, that a single, omnipotent entity had fashioned a perfect universe in one sweep, then stuck around as a kind of maintenance engineer to fix any problems or issues that may arise due to technical imperfections in the original design, Pootle and Frick discovered that the universe was in fact created and managed by “a committee comprised of more than one, possibly very, very many entities with frequently divergent and incompatible goals”.

“Biodiversity is the primary stumbling block,” said Dr. Pootle. “Whoever created this cacophony of species would have had to be infinitely powerful and infinitely creative, but also infinitely schizophrenic to come up with the myriad different solutions to identical problems that the creators of the universe have. Either that, or we’re looking at a different kind of process altogether.”

The Pootle and Frick study found that for any particular biological niche, a vast number of different approaches are taken by different species for solving nearly identical issues of survival. They also found that species are never static, but are constantly “being tweaked” in small but easily verifiable ways.

“If you’re one guy designing a universe, why come up with twenty different ways of tackling the same issue?” Pootle said. “If you’re omnipotent, presumably you know perfectly well whatever the one solution is that will work best, and you go with that. The fact that the world obviously doesn’t work that way is what led us first to the committee theory. The plants and animals that inhabit the Earth show the kinds of random and incoherent thinking that can only otherwise be found in the products of design committees where there’s a lot of CYA and turf protection going on.”

Once Pootle and Frick had formed the committee hypothesis, they set to work trying to determine exactly how many separate entities may have been and are currently involved in the universe’s creation and ongoing maintenance.

“It’s quite a challenge,” Dr. Pootle said. “We know it’s more than one—that’s incontrovertible. The problem is nailing precisely how many creators the universe actually has. The closer we looked at the problem, the more we found. At the moment our thinking is that there is at least one committee of at least five omnipotent entities for every individual species on the planet, with little or no work-sharing or information exchange between different committees and often little internal cooperation. It’s one holy rigid mother of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Extremely simple and poorly designed species, like an amoeba, for example, probably have committees of at least two dozen designers. They’re typical examples of the kind of work that gets produced when no one is capable of either making an independent decision or talking to the guy in the next cubicle. Same goes for penguins.”

Pootle and Frick’s data thus puts the theoretical number of entities directly involved in the creation and ongoing design of the universe at roughly five times the total number of species on the planet Earth, at minimum.

“We’re pretty confident that estimate is extremely low-balled, even given the possibility that certain omnipotent creators may sit on more than one committee,” Dr. Frick said. “After all, the Earth is only one of a potentially infinite number of inhabited planets in the universe. When you start looking at those numbers, you’re talking about a management structure that’s a lot more unwieldy than anything we can rationally conceptualize.”

An alternative explanation, that the randomness and diversity of life on Earth may be caused by the progressive alteration of species over successive generations due to small variations caused by spontaneous and random cellular mutations, with those members of a species best equipped for survival also proving most likely to successfully reproduce, as theorized by Charles Darwin, is discounted by Pootle and Frick as “mystical speculation”.

“If that were the case, what would the role of an interventionist creation committee be, exactly?” asked Dr. Pootle. “They’d be right out of a job.”

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor