Why is the Intelligent Designer so inept?

Hi, Cavediver.The natural response from the religious is that the Designer's point wasn't to make an optimal Creation, but to make a creation that was suitable for testing His children for their eternal destinations. It seems natural that a suitable test would not include an optimal design, because there would be no challenge for us---not much of a test.To me, of course, the sub-optimal condition of the physical body is simply a consequence of the Designer's Creation process---natural laws, including evolution. I'd say it's a truly brilliant Designer who can set things up so that they can build themselves and adapt to local conditions, even if the result is less than optimal. That's why I believe my Designer is superior to Buzsaw's and Beretta's. {AbE: My theological beliefs strongly include (perhaps even revolve around) the concept of free agency, wherein each individual is allowed to make his or her own choices. I believe this extends---in some fashion---to everything else, too: God doesn't get too involved in things, but just lets them go at it on their own. That's why the universe seems to be built on principles of philosophical materialism.}Edited by Bluejay, : Marked addition.

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Cavediver. Yeah, I guess I didn't factor that in. Most Mormons would also believe in the good/perfect creation before the Fall, too. I don't really hold myself to a literal Fall story, but sometimes I pretend to in Church just so I won't offend any fundies (they might pressure the bishop to get me excommunicated if they found out).I was trying to explain something like the following viewpoint (from Intelligent (maybe), but far from perfect, message #54 ): It’s a change of perspective about the word “perfect”: the creation doesn’t have to be “perfect”---as in, without flaws---it just has to be “perfect” for the task the creator had in mind for it, which was the grand test of this life.This may go a fair distance toward understanding the Designer, too: obviously, the Designer didn’t make things without flaws or defects, so, assuming that He/She/It/They really is/are omnipotent, there must be a reason why He/She/It/They didn’t make things without flaw. If you assume that there is an omnipotent Designer, the lack of “flawlessness” in the design could be considered good evidence that this Designer is, in fact, a God that wants to test its creation through hardship. Of course, there would then be several other hypotheses to test.-----My case against the "perfect before the Fall" story goes like this: In order for the human body to be optimal/perfect, you'd have to pretty much change it until it's unrecognizable, because the whole thing's a big wash.

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Buzz. I think this is a little unfair. Cavediver is also making the best of his frail, human condition by using what little he has been given to try to understand the great mysteries of the universe. And, if the physical design of an organ is any indication of the Designer's intentions for it, that's pretty much exactly what God expects Cavediver to do with his brain.I'm sure God (at least the God after the Christian tradition) is very proud of His children who are trying to transcend their mortal bounds by the limited means He gave them: wouldn't you be proud if your crippled son made the basketball team?

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Rahvin. I have to say that I really don't like this line of argument at all.First off, all the human designers, engineers and scientists that have ever lived, put together, couldn't have created something like a human body with the tools we have available, so we at least know that, if there's a Designer, it's superior to the best we can muster on our own. I’ll let you decide on your own whether that means anything in particular, because I’m not sure what I think yet.Second, even though I know it’s basically an untestable cop-out, I have to agree with Iano (whom I quoted above) that we just don’t know the mind of the Designer (assuming there is one), so it’s hard to place a judgment call on the Designer’s skills or reasoning. I just don’t think we can honestly, objectively say that the lack of physical perfection correlates with divineincompetence: there’s still too much we don’t know.Now, if you’re talking about half-witted jackass idiots who insist that God loves us infinitely, has the ability to do absolutely anything that could ever be conceived, and whose only reason for creating us is so that we can live forever in a happy place where we’ll just be singing His praises non-stop for all eternity, then maybe I’ll retract my second point. But, if you’re willing to consider a God that follows a set system of rules and obligations, whose purpose is the continual growth and progress of beings below Him, then my second point stands: a God like that could have myriad reasons why physical imperfection is contrary to His plan.To me, the Evangelical/Protestant views are nonsense, not because it relies on an intelligent designer to have created something that seems unintelligently designed, but because they insist that God designed a plan whereby a person must pass through this painful maze of physical life in order to get to a happy place because somebody else broke one of His rules long time ago, while also insisting that He is fully capable of just putting us in the happy place from the start. Not only is that unfair, but it seems completely pointless.Assuming that there is a God, the fact that adversity is an integral part of this life is a sure indication to me that any afterlife is not going to be all happy and carefree: if it were, why would God be wasting His time teaching us things like patience, endurance and humility? Why not just give us a flawless body and let us live somewhere happy, beautiful and carefree now? If His love for us is real, why would He be hammering us so hard in this life if the hammering isn’t going to do any for us in the next life?To me, any afterlife that there may be will still be life as we know it: work to do and problems to solve (allbeit, different work and different problems). That’s why God didn’t iron out all the flaws for us here: because we need to learn how to deal with them to prepare us for the life to come.Sorry for the sermon. Feel free to ignore it if you’d like: it may not have contributed much to the topic, anyway.

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Rahvin. I was under the impression that the point of this thread was to start with the assumption that we were designed and discuss what this implies about the Designer. If that's not correct, I apologize for my comments, because they clearly didn't meet the intent of the thread. I don’t think we can make any inferences at all about what a Designer would do, unless we first make a judgment call as the intention of the design. For example, human designers made the game “MouseTrap,” which was intentionally given dozens of possible sources of failure as a mechanic of the game. That doesn’t mean the designers of that game were incompetent: any one of them could probably have designed a mouse trap that effectively catches mice, but they chose not to for the purposes of the game.Your argument effectively states that optimal physical performance is the only possible purpose for design, and I don't see any reason why we should make that assumption. But, this automatically rules out a lot of possible Designer psyches: for instance, a Designer that delights in seeing mortal beings come to harm would be fully consistent with these design features, and it wouldn’t have to be incompetent. Also, a Designer whose intention in giving us imperfection is to teach us how to take care of things (like our bodies) is also consistent with the given information.On what basis do you exclude these explanations in your assessment of the Designer? I guess I would have to have added that "as yet" part to make my previous statements compatible with my personal beliefs, too. But (again, assuming that there is a Designer), the fact that the Designer could make eyes millions of years before we made a camera is a good indication that it is at least ahead of us. Percy brought up the fact that we still haven’t been able to make what the Designer assumably did make, which clearly indicates that we aren’t at the Designer’s level (yet).

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Rahvin. Well, I’ll grant you this, for sure. But, the incompetency argument is the same: it’s just one of the many equally-valid possibilities. Your first two posts seemed to be pushing it pretty strongly, so I challenged it. It wasn’t my intent to become an apologetics troll. I apologize if I misinterpreted you at all or put words in your mouth. I was really trying to avoid going directly for the traditional Christian God, because of this very argument. I wanted to start from the single assumption of some form of Designer, and see what could be inferred. If we assume that there is a Designer, I think we can both agree that it couldn’t realistically be simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (?) in the strictest sense of those words. You’ll get no argument from me about that. I have no objections to this. Again, no objections.But I wasn’t assuming specific creation, either. I figured a Designer that made humans by redesigning apes was also valid. Well, again, assuming specific creation and strict omni-qualities, I have no objections. But, in the absence of those assumptions, it’s not possible to make any sort of inference at all about the cause or purpose of our designed imperfections.-----Now that I understand better where you’re coming from, it seems that we’re not really in disagreement about anything here. Amazing how short a debate can be when both sides are logical.

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Rahvin. I don't really mind it: I love hypothetical speculation. I actually started out wanting to be a science fiction writer, and got into real science when I started studying to make my work more realistic. Consequently, I never published a story or anything, and I ended up studying insects. Of course, it's kind of annoying that debates like this thread can't logically go anywhere in particular. Oh well.

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Rahvin Warning: this thread contains lots of unfounded speculation. Forgive me (any reader) if this sounds a bit macabre, but nature (or the Designer, in this thread) already had a mechanism in place for removing the faulty parts in a population---natural selection. So, the interesting thing is that all the good, life-saving work of the doctors has the unfortunate consequence of allowing the “defects” to persist in the population; whereas the inate creation of our Designer removes these.This seems to indicate, if we’re assuming a Designer, that the Designer had the interests of the population in mind more than the individual. After all, the Designer’s mechanism preserves the population’s health at the expense of the individual. So, our Designer is omnibenevolent towards populations, but not towards individuals, and we see it as cruel because we got shafted for it (cruelty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps?). So, perhaps we should be looking for evidence of a right-wing, communist, eugenicist (even eusocial?) Designer, instead of a left-wing, human-rights-activist, due-process-and-tax-breaks-for-everyone Designer.Seems to me, that’s what the Old Testament’s God was all about. So, the ancient Hebrews could possibly have been more correct in their protrayal of the Designer than the modern Christians and IDists?It could also imply that the Designer is, in fact, a population itself, as Bluegenes has suggested somewhere else. Of course, this begs the question: why, then, is intelligence a quality of individuals, rather than of populations?-----Well, I guess my idea kind of assumes that a population Designer couldn’t have created a defect-free population, either. Oh well: still some bugs to work out, I guess.Perhaps the Designer still has to obey thermodynamics. That could also explain why somebody had to “pay the price” for our sins: you can’t get something for nothing, right? Hey, so far, it sounds fairly consistent with Christian theology and Old Testament history.

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Darwin loves you.

It seems that many here are in agreement that the Designer cannot be simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent based on the "designs" we see in nature.But, do you think that, assuming a Designer, the evidence supports a Designer that is simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient and omnimalevolent? Or, do you think we have to strike a middle-ground somewhere and consider the Designer just regular "benevolent," "malevolent" or "neutral-mal/benevolent?"I would personally tend to put my money on "neutral" or "slightly benevolent," perhaps even regular ol' "benevolent," because an omnimalevolent (or even just regular malevolent) Designer would have designed us so that every step we took, we'd break a toe; every food item we imbibed would poison us or make us gag a few times, and would taste bad on top of it; and every smell would be offensive to our noses; and, on top of all that, we'd have senses that would never become dulled to pain or bad smells. The God we have at least gives us eventual relief from these things some of the time.Or, perhaps somebody thinks it's even more cruel for the Designer to let us live in comfort, think things are good, praise Him as magnificent and benevolent, then, for no reason, smite us with cataracts and wisdom teeth?

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Darwin loves you.

Hi, Buzz. You know that I believe in God, too. I haven’t been shy about admitting on this forum that I am a theist. But, I have a lot of major concerns about how mainstream Christians (and non-mainstreamers like Mormons) go about their thought processes, and for good reason.This angle of attack is not going to do the slightest bit of good for you, for your cause, or for anybody that you’re trying to convince. I know they started this one, and I can see why Cavediver’s and Rahvin’s approach to this topic might offend you. But, spitting back isn’t going to help, for three reasons:

1. ”Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” was part of the law that Jesus’s Atonement did away with.
2. Nobody’s going to want to listen to your idea if you argue it with a tactic of personal insults.
3. If God wants Cavediver and Rahvin rebuked for their insolence and blasphemy, He is fully capable of doing it Himself.

Look, I get quite upset about this sort of topic too: it almost invariably turns into a ranting session about God’s malevolence and cruelty, and I don’t believe that God is cruel or malevolent. I believe God is omniscient (for all intents and purposes relevant to our stay on Earth), so I’m sure He understands what has led Rahvin and Cavediver to their conclusions. I’m sure He is also aware that the reasoning process they use is really the best we can muster as “puny little mortals”---after all, He “designed” us that way---so I don’t see why this thing should outrage Him at all. In fact, it shouldn’t even surprise Him. How could He get mad at something for simply doing what He fully expected them to do when He made them?I was a missionary in Taiwan for two years. I can tell you from personal experience that rebuking people for their disbelief never, ever works, even on a humble and inoffensive people like the Chinese. The best thing you could do is at least try to discuss things with people. Look how Rahvin and I reached an understanding after maybe four posts, because we didn’t go at the problem trying to prove our points: we went at it searching for a solution. And, we found one: I understand what he’s saying, and he understands what I’m saying, and now we can just get over each other’s viewpoints and try to discuss something rational.And, who knows, maybe we could come up with a Designer that Rahvin could agree is both compatible with the evidence and isn’t cruel or incompetent. Almost certainly, this Designer concept would not fit the profile for a Christian God, but the point isn't to make it "perfect" on the first try. A step forward is better than stalemate.The first ideas about evolution only somewhat fit the model that is broadly accepted by science today, but they didn’t just discard those old ideas because of their imperfections: they kept them for their strengths, and science has since been working on and correcting the weaknesses. Undoubtedly, scientists fifty years from now will have added much more to our understanding of evolution, and the scientific model will better fit the actual phenomenon in nature than the current model does. That’s what science and logic do.The same could be said for any other scientific pursuit. For example, Cavediver and his colleagues work on Big Bang Theory, and they’ve answered many questions and filled in many blanks that the original formulators of the theory could not account for. The model gets better all the time.Why can’t we do the same here with our concept of an Intelligent Designer? Let’s look at the evidence, make some inferences, and come to a preliminary conclusion. Then, if any new information comes up, we can change our ID model.Here’s what I was trying to do. Since my “God population” failed because it was essentially just a less parsimonious version of Bluegenes’ argument, I decided to start from scratch with what everybody else was saying. There are three attributes of an Intelligent Designer that we can work with: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. The discussion has leaned heavily against all three being unlimited “good” simultaneously, based only on the physical evidence. Even if you don’t agree with this, it’s best to just grant it to the majority opinion and move to the next step: that’s a good way to keep the discussion going. Otherwise, we’re just stuck with the first step for 300 posts, and it decays into insults and bad logic.So, let’s say they’re right that omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence are not all consistent with the physical evidence left by the Designer. So, we’ve established sort of a cap value: no one here will accept a God that hits that value. So, I tried in Message 89 to establish some sort of minimum value by completely minimizing one of the three qualities (I chose omnibenevolence, because it seems to be the most prominent in the debate so far). That way, we could ascertain what range of possibilities the debaters on the thread are willing to consider.We could try the same by minimizing each of the other two qualities while simultaneously maximizing the others.Minimizing Power: Is the evidence consistent with a Designer who is omniscient, omnibenevolent and omni-impotent? No, Percy covered that in Message 28: clearly, the Designer must have a great level of power in order to design the universe in its present state, even if it is somewhat imperfect.Minimizing Knowledge: It the evidence consistent with a Designer who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omni-ignorant? No, Percy’s post probably covers that one too.The other two having been addressed pretty well beforehand, I tried the third:Minimizing Benevolence: Is the evidence consistent with a Designer who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnimalevolent? I argued that the evidence is not, because the Designer has at least allowed us the possibility of respite from the bad things. No one has yet taken me up on this.Assuming that everyone agrees that the evidence is not consistent with omnimalevolence, we have then established a range of possibile benevolences that those on this forum might be willing to accept.Perhaps by repeatedly raising and lowering the gauges on the three qualities, we can find the maximum levels of knowledge, power and mercy the evidence allows. Then, all of the theists here can decide whether this God is good enough for them. If not, you can be free to reject it, but I am personally very interested in finding out what everyone could come up with.Whether or not we pursue this is ultimately up to Cavediver, because I am only assuming that this is consistent with his intentions for this thread. I certainly do not want to hijack his thread. I would be willing to take this to another thread, if Cavediver would prefer it.Edited by Bluejay, : Addition.

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Darwin loves you.

{Content hidden. This is like the topic irrelevant chit-chat that induced me to close the topic earlier. - Adminnemooseus}Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Hid content and added comment.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

Hi, Traderdrew.Welcome to EvC!Before I begin, I'd like to draw your attention to the dBCodes options at EvC. For example, press the "peek" button at the bottom right corner of this message, and you can see the codes that I entered to make the following quote boxes:

quote:

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Something some person said.

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It's much easier to follow the discussion if you use these quoting formats for stuff you're cutting and pasting from other peoples' posts.-----Okay, now I would like to add a few things to Percy's explanations about phyla and the Tree of Life.If you go back to the Cambrian period and look at the fossil organisms carefully, you will notice that the different phyla were not as well-defined back then as they are now. You will notice, for instance, that the entirety of our phylum, the Chordata, that was present in the Cambrian period, were small, simple, soft-bodied creatures that are more similar to worms and slugs than they are to us, at least in morphology.You will also notice that the oldest "arthropods" do not have legs, which are the defining feature of their phylum in modern times. These ancient arthropods would later develop flap-like structures attached to their gills, which would eventually develop into segmented legs.Today, we look out over the diversity of life, and we see that zebras and octopus and mosquitos are extremely different organisms. Thus, when we hear that the phyla that include zebras, octopus and mosquitos all appeared in the Cambrian period, we envision complex chordates, cephalopods and insects popping up from nowhere, and conclude that evolution couldn't possibly explain this.But, the truth is that the zebras of the Cambrian were small, squishy, worm-like proto-fish with very little, if any, skeleton; that the octopus of the Cambrian were shelly snails without differentiated tentacles; and that the mosquitos of the Cambrian were worm-like swimming things without legs, antennae or wings.In fact, close observation would show that the Cambrian animals are more similar to one another than their purported descendants are to them. Compare Haikouichthys, for instance, to a ring-tailed lemur, then to a sea cucumber, and tell me which it more closely resembles.-----Phyla did not appear in the Cambrian: rather, many Cambrian animals evolved from a common stock, and we retrospectively classified them into different phyla based on the distinguishing characteristics of their descendants. The vague hints of these diagnostic characters that can be found in Cambrian animals shows the fragility of our classification system for these creatures: while a check-mark next to "notocord" or "jointed legs" looks really good on paper, in reality, it's very difficult to discern these features in Cambrian animals.Edited by Bluejay, : No reason given.Edited by Bluejay, : "the" and "that" are very different words.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Traderdrew. Chemical processes are inherently imperfect.Why would the genome need error-correction mechanisms if errors are not made?And, if the nucleic acid-and-proteins system that replicates DNA makes errors, and the error-correction mechanism is based on essentially the same nucleic acid-and-proetins system, why should you assume that it doesn't also make errors.It's actually a well-documented fact that many replication errors are overlooked by the error-correction system.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Traderdrew. What evolutionary pressure is there for humans to develop better eyes? Glasses, contacts and laser surgery largely remove the detrimental effects of bad eyes, so what could possibly be driving us to develop better eyes?Furthermore, evolution does not have to happen in the direction of "better": cavefish and centipedes lost their eyes entirely due to the lack of evolutionary pressure to improve upon them.And, evolution certainly doesn't have to be working towards a maximum for any given trait.----- What do you mean: mutations that occur during the embryonic stages, or mutations whose effects are expressed at this stage?The problem with your claim is that there is currently no practical way of testing for the occurrence of a mutation without observing a visible handicap or other phenotypic change, so, by definition, all (or at least most) mutations we have so far observed would be detrimental.But, how exactly can you extrapolate it to those mutations that we can't detect?----- Well, of course there are a lot of scientists who don't like the idea. You could come up with any category of opinions, and you will find many scientists who fit into it.That's not the point, though: I am a scientist, and I personally would be very interested (and, theologically speaking, relieved---I am a Christian, after all) to learn that there is a Designer involved in the process of evolution somehow. But, I do not spend my time trying to find evidence for it, because such endeavours have a long history of disappointing failures, and I have a wife and a baby whose sustenance depends on my ability to convince funding agencies and employers that my research is worth the money they'll pay me.Over the years, a heavy amount of inertia has developed in the search for Design in nature, because not a single attempt to uncover such a mechanism in action has ever succeeded in producing positive evidence to support it.Economically speaking, don't you agree that it sounds silly to keep looking for evidence for a Designer, which has consistently eluded us for 150 years, particularly when supporting evidence for an alternative explanation is so easy to come by?That's the real reason scientists are hesitant to get involved in ID. It is usually not because they are philosophically opposed to it, but rather, because science has no future in that direction, just as it has no future in the direction of phlogiston, alchemy or geocentric astronomy.Edited by Bluejay, : added "practical" and "(or at least most)" in there

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Traderdrew.When you reply to multiple people at once, it would be nice if you somehow made it apparent. You can make a "qs"-coded quote list the writer's name by writing "qs=writer's name" instead of just "qs" in the opening code. Biochemists are biologists.----- You question the objectivity of a guy who accepts a theory that directly conflicts with his personal belief system? Are you sure you know what "objectivity" means?Why would this cause you to question my objectivity, anyway? Because I'm only interested in working on theories that show promise? How does this make sense to you?----- Drew, this isn't a revelation to anybody. In fact, academic persons are so aware that their personal biases can impact their conclusions in undesirable ways, that they invented a method to lessen the effects. They called it, "the scientific method," or "science," for short.The entire point of science is to prevent personal opinions from dictating what is accepted as truth. Perfect objectivity is still beyond us, but the simple fact is that scientific thought is infinitely less prone to bias than is religious thought.----- I did not share my belief system with you, so I’m not sure how you were able to determine what it supports.----- The creator is, however, apparently interested in making the creation process look like the result of naturalistic processes such as evolution. This creator apparently does not want us to find out about It or Its power. Yet, strangely, in the Bible, this same Creator had no qualms about manifesting Its power through magic tricks and miracles.Why has It become so secretive of late, in your opinion?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.