Why is the Intelligent Designer so inept?

What do you want Buz, a medal? You seem to want points for not cutting our heads off. That's not how morality works. You're not supposed to cut peoples heads off. You don't get credit for not doing things that you're not supposed to do anyway.Besides, your accusation that blasphemy against the Muslim god (who, despite your usual protestations, is the same god as yours, the god of Abraham) will result in beheadings is just bullshit. Let's test it out shall we;The Muslim god, Allah, if he is the creator of this world and all its life, is a fucking idiot. What an incompetent. He's useless, unable to even give me a functioning pair of kidneys. The ones he made for me were crap.I look to having my head chopped off in the near future. If any would-be Jihadis could pop round to execute me between 6pm and 9pm weekdays, that would be most convenient. Thank you.

---

Mutate and Survive

That would be surprising, since I'm British and have never even been to the USA.My kidneys are not failing. They failed. They were put right by medical science. If not for steroids I would never have lived to see my tenth birthday. I suffered from nefrotic syndrome. It can indeed be related to food, specifically food allergies, but it can also arise spontaneously. In my case, no food allergy was ever implicated. Even if it had been caused by a food allergy, don't you think that an intelligent designer might have taken in to account the fact that his creations were going to need to eat? I was nine years old when I developed NS. My parents always made sure I had a very good diet. Actually, it's more usual for NS to present in infants about 2-3 years old. What exactly do you think is so wrong with their diets?NS is not a lifestyle illness and your insistence that it is is, frankly, quite patronising.Of course I was one of the lucky ones. I was born after the advent of anabolic steroids, so I got to live, unlike the millions of kids before me, who had died slow wasting deaths from NS, an especially horrible way to go.So, getting back to the point here, what can we deduce about our designer from all this?He is unable to design a set of kidneys that can reliably do the job they are supposed to do. So he is not a complete idiot perhaps, but certainly not omnipotent/omniscient.orHe deliberately designed the kidneys in such a way that they would malfunction and kill millions of little kids in an unpleasant way. So he is a cruel bastard who kills children.Neither of the above is especially impressive. They certainly don't inspire any desire to worship the designer. I would quite like to kick his ass though.

---

Mutate and Survive

What's so bad about blasphemy? Every time you recite the Lord's Prayer, you blaspheme against Krishna. Hmmm... I was nine when my kidneys failed. How good a brain do you think I had then? Personally, I'm quite glad that I was given the chance to develop the brain I have now, rather than dying at nine years old. Positive enough for you?Actually, I'm not concerned about myself; I'm fine after all. What bothers me is not what might have happened, but what definitely did happen; millions of kids died horrible deaths because of nefrotic syndrome. There was no cure for NS until the 1930's. Before that all the kids who developed it died. They died because their kidney's were not up to the job. Most of them would have been about two to three years old.Are you telling me that the designer/creator didn't foresee this flaw? If so, then he is not omniscient.Are you telling me that the designer/creator couldn't prevent this flaw? If so, then he is not omnipotent.Are you telling me that the designer/creator deliberately created this flaw? If so, then he is not omnibenevolent.In fact, if the flaw is deliberate, I would go so far as to say that he is a child murderer, on a scale that makes the worst human killers look like amateurs.I have no idea why you mention your friend and his liver problems. It isn't relevant. He has been saved by human intervention, just as I was, not your creator God, who stood back on the sidelines and watched, doing nothing, as usual. What exactly do we have to thank him for?

---

Mutate and Survive

I'll take a stab at that if I may. It would be quite nice if eating all of the delightfully designed foods;a) Didn't make me fat, with the most delicious foods tending to be the main offenders.
b) Didn't have to include killing God's animal creations if I want to eat meat.
c) Wasn't an absolute requirement in order to avoid starvation.
d) Never resulted in allergic reactions.
e) Never included the risk of ingesting poisonous substances.It would also be quite nice if those "luscious aromatic plants" didn't all seem to come with their very own plant pest to make growing them so difficult. Another one of my squash plants has gone down with bloody mosaic virus today. Of course, for me it's just a pain in the arse. For a subsistence farmer it could spell disaster. Why does God have to make these things so complicated?

---

Mutate and Survive

76%+22%+4%=102%Great work Lucy, keep it up. Have you forgotten the last time I called you on conflating Piltdown Man with Nebraska Man? No-one filed down any pig's teeth, you're mixing up your dodgy hominids again. Nebraska Man was a pig tooth, but it was an honest mistake. It was not filed down. Piltdown Man didn't contain any pig's teeth.Great work Lucy, keep it up. Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add off-topic banner.

---

Mutate and Survive

Let me get this straight.Adam and Eve were born perfect. Only after the fall did they become imperfect. Thus, the sort of imperfections we have been complaining about in this thread are the result of the sinful actions of Adam and Eve and some of their more immediate descendants.That means that the untold millions who have had their lives blighted by Down's syndrome, sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and countless other maladies are suffering the effects of a divine punishment aimed at people who died millennia ago.How utterly monstrous.It is all very well to bleat about free will, but what free will does a child born with fragile-x syndrome have? Are really expecting us to believe that individuals who can't even be held responsible for themselves are being held responsible for the acts of their long-dead ancestors, by an omnibenevolent god?God set the tests here. He defined the parameters of good and evil, according to your story. He set the punishments, knowing the consequences, knowing that mankind would fail and that countless millions would suffer terribly for acts they did not commit. He is omniscient isn't he? He must have seen it coming. He did it anyway.These are not the actions of an intelligent, benevolent being. They are the actions of a murderous psychopath. I'm glad I don't believe in such a foul creature.

---

Mutate and Survive

Subbie's right, you are turning into an evilutionist. However, since lousy designs cannot possibly be selected for at the expense of perfect designs, your god must have specifically created the inferior, post-fall designs too. According to your model, he made them as punishments, to be visited against the innocent for generations to come. What a sick freak. In what sense can an infant with fragile-x be said to have been warned against actions committed thousands of years ago? But why not? The designer is the one who set all this in motion. He is the one who designed these tortures. He is the one who choose to visit the punishments upon the sinned-against as well as the sinner. He is the one who specifically designed cystic fibrosis, so that he might torture innocents with it.What kind of benevolence is that? Why hold children responsible for the sins of their forebears? What kind of morality is that exactly?Should we, as Agobot suggested, punish the modern youth of Germany for the sins of their Nazi forebears?Should we punish Joseph Fritzl for imprisoning his family? Hey, why stop there? Let's punish his kids as well. They were clearly asking for it.Pissed off about Russia's antics in Georgia? Blame Putin? Then let's kill his kids! After all, it's completely not their fault, so let's punish them terribly, along with his dog and anyone who happens to be nearby.What kind of morality is this? A child with fragile-x can't be responsible for the actions of its long-dead ancestors. To punish that child for another's actions is immoral. Even worse, the child is the party who has been sinned against (denied a place in Eden). Do we punish the victim as well as the perpetrator? Are these the attitudes of a benevolent being? If so, how? It's not like that at all. Should America turn its back on its founding principles, that's unfortunate. Fortunately, Americans can then embrace those principles once again and put things right.The child with fragile-x is stuck with it, no matter how good a person it might try to be. What's more, the American public may make mistakes. God is supposed to be above error. Your analogy is piss-poor. WTF? Are you even reading what is being said to you? If I ignore my body's needs and I suffer the consequences, that's one thing. What you are suggesting is that my distant ancestor commits the offence and I suffer for it, along with millions of others, including all those innocent children.I ask again; what kind of morality is this?

---

Mutate and Survive

Firstly, I would love to see you substantiate that last claim. It's not really the point though. We are quite clearly talking about genetic disorders, maladies that people are born with, more than lifestyle diseases (although a human body that was able to withstand a degree more ill-use wouldn't be a bad idea).I gave the specific example of fragile-X syndrome. That is something people are born with. It comes as part of the package, part of the design if we are believe you. It is as though you bought your brand new Ford and it came with an existing malfunction before you even got it out on the road. In such a case you would blame the manufacturer. I'm doing the same. You seem to be attempting to blame illness upon those who suffer from it, a shameful slander in my opinion.I notice that you ignored the difficult questions again. I'll ask once more;In what sense can an infant with fragile-x be said to have been warned against actions committed thousands of years ago?If human frailty is caused by The Fall, how is it moral to punish infants for crimes they did not commit? What does that have to do with anything? No-one is denying that some aspects of the human body are amazing. This thread is addressing the obvious design failings, like congenital disease, poor eyesight, quadruped hips on a biped, etc. Those are what you need to explain. I can't believe that you have been on this forum five years without coming to realise that your caricature is not what evolutionists believe. Naturally yes. Randomly no.

---

Mutate and Survive

Hi Kevin123 and welcome to EvC, Agreed. Strange then, with so many possibilities, that the hypothesis of choice amongst ID advocates for the identity of the designer should be God. Who do you suspect the designer to be, Kevin123? And yet the designer, who could make living cells, also seems to have made many elementary design errors, that even we stupid humans can spot. Why did he gives us hips and lower backs that would make more sense in a quadruped? Why did he give us eyes that display such appalling flaws as near/far sightedness and blind spots?Much has already been made in this thread of the comparative high quality of octopus eyes. Clearly the designer could have done better with human eyes. Why did he give us such poor quality optical equipment? Does he not like us or something?What about genetic illness? Why include conditions such as sickle cell or fragile-X syndrome? Is that really an example of good design? A clearly false comparison. Proving that one thing is created does not prove that any other thing is created. Proving that humans design computers does nothing at all to prove that living organisms were designed. Short of a time machine and a multi-billion year life span, it is going to be quite hard to observe the evolution of a modern life form, all the way from a single cell. Just as well that we have the fossil record then, isn't it.When scientists can't observe an event directly, they look for evidence that the event may have left. Do you have some kind of a problem with that approach? One would hope not, since the supposed creation of life by God, sorry, "the designer", most certainly can't be directly observed. Except that's not quite what's being argued here. The issue at hand is the clear contradiction between the undoubted brilliance that would be necessary of the "designer" and the utter stupidity of his many mistakes. This glaring inconsistency doesn't really disprove ID altogether, but it certainly casts grave doubts upon it, especially for those ID'ers who would like to identify the designer as the perfect Christian god.Mutate and Survive

---

"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade