Insipid Design
Well, yes. It’s an obvious thought, isn’t it. One of the first that occurs to us, in fact. If the Designer is so damn intelligent, why aren’t we better? Why isn’t everything? I mean, is this supposed to be optimal? You’re kidding, right?
Far be it from me to kick an idea when it’s down, but I do wonder whether proponents of ID have really thought this through…Because if we were designed by God, it wasn’t on one of His better days.
Yeah you could say that.
Why would an intelligent designer equip each of us with an appendix — an organ whose sole purpose is to become infected and periodically explode? If this was Intelligent Design, then it implies the designer hates us the way many interior designers hate the people who actually live in their creations.
Right so the appendix is kind of like a cook or server spitting in your soup. That and one or two other glitches I can think of. Backs, colons, cholesterol, knees. And if we asked giraffes or hummingbirds or snakes or worms, they might have a few items to throw into the pot too. Maybe snakes and worms would actually like to have arms and legs, you know? Ever thought of that? No, neither did the oh so clever designer, either, apparently. Unless it did, and witheld them to be mean.
Remember, if we are the products of an Intelligent Design, there’s no excuse for such design flaws. It would be like buying a new car and finding out someone had forgotten to include brakes. I wouldn’t call that Intelligent Design.
Well, exactly. I wrote an essay for TPM Online a couple of years ago that says much the same thing.
It’s all such a ramshackly arrangement, really. Who set this up? A little more imagination wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Some bigger thinking. Quite a lot more generosity, scope, long-term planning wouldn’t have come amiss. Following things through, realizing implications, seeing where all these pathetic contrivances were going to lead – you’d think that would be part of the job, quite frankly. To be brutally honest, one wonders if whoever did this even had an engineering degree. Degree, hell, one wonders if the poor bungler ever even took a single class. Maybe it was an eight o’clock, is that it? Sleep too attractive, so the result is we have to put up with these ridiculous bodies that break so easily, that get stiff and slow and then stop altogether, that ooze and drip all sorts of foul smelly liquids, that have to be fueled every few hours and turned completely off for nearly a third of every day, that get too cold or too hot, tired or sick, frightened or sad, angry or deranged? That come with throats that get sore, lungs that fill with fluid, guts that malfunction, teeth that rot and crack? And of course there’s no warranty. In short, one or two design flaws, wouldn’t you say? Rather obvious design flaws? I mean, what were they doing? Working with their eyes shut? Did they not test the product? Did they just slap something together and then ship without even checking it, or what? It’s not as if these things are subtle, or hard to detect. It’s not as if they don’t show up right away, is it.
I even mentioned the car without brakes. (Well it is an obvious example, isn’t it, so that’s not surprising.)
It is hard not to get exasperated. It’s all so obvious. A child could have noticed. (Maybe it is a child?) It’s not just the bodies, though they’re bad enough, it’s so many other things too. This place we’re given to live, for instance –
I mean, it has such potential. Don’t get me wrong. Of course I realize that, I’m not stupid, I’m not blind, I know about the good bits. I’ve stood and marveled at the oceans with the best of them. Sunsets, stars, mountains, waterfalls, flowers, fruit – all lovely, yes, I know. I admire it all as much as anyone. But so what? Does that mean the not-so-good parts are not a problem? Do we usually think about things that way? ‘Well this shirt is a lovely colour so I really don’t mind that it’s full of holes. This car has excellent tires so it’s okay that the brakes don’t work.’ No I don’t think so, I think we want all the parts to work, thank you very much, not just some of them. Is that so much to ask?
And why can’t we fly? And live forever, but hibernate for awhile when we get bored? And make some kind of electric ray shoot out of our heads so that all the cell phones within a quarter of a mile would stop working? And if we wanted not to have hair on some particular part of our bodies where there was hair, just decide not to have it there and be done with it? And go deaf whenever we wanted to, and stop being deaf whenever we wanted to do that? And have a filter so that we would hear what we wanted to hear and not hear what we didn’t want to hear? And live underwater if we feel like it? And see in the dark? And be invisible? And have our own climate control dial built into the backs of our hands?
Intelligent designer ha. Just ha. Inattentive designer. Inept designer. Inclined to do sloppy work designer. In for a nasty shock if it expects me to give it a round of applause designer.
OB, only one intelligent designer? It is as obvious as Paley’s watch in Behe’s black box that there are several designers, all working against each other. To give a small example: there are viruses in wild mice that are passed vertically from mother to embryo because they have infected the mice chromosomes that cause leukemia; and there are mice that are resistant to this because the chromosome has slightly mutated, blocking cell division among virus infected lymphocytes. Now, obviously, when you have a bug and a counterbug, you have two hackers. And this is one example out of millions. So I imagine what ID would tell us is that there is a universe of hackers creating intelligent designs that are then countered by other designs created by other hackers. Funny, though — this leads to an arms race that is almost inevitably (gasp!) evolutionary.
There are, of course, obvious reasons this wasn’t used in the Dover case. Science is perfectly capable of knocking down the Irreducible Complexity argument on its own, without having to resort to what is, in essence, the same type of argument as IC, except it works in the other direction and is just as unfalsifiable and untestable, even if it does make a lot more sense.
On the one hand we have Dawkins claiming the world looks exactly how we’d expect it to if no higher power was giving it direction. On the other hand, we have the fact that so much theology has, er, evolved precisely to try to explain so many of the bad things. Not necessarily the minute details like the appendix which are so compelling, but the general questions of suffering and death. And, in some cases, also precisely those things we were mentioning. From the King James translation: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…” It’s a punishment, not a great idea; the Bible is doing more than implying that the original “design” was better and included ways to reproduce without all the risk and hardship (assuming that it is necessarily a great idea to have organisms reproduce and die in generations, rather than just having a bunch of them hang around for eternity, replaced in the same way the originals were created if wear and tear eventually made this necessary). God buggered it up deliberately because he didn’t like the way his previously perfect creations had been abusing the wonderful things he gave them, including the temptations to disobey his explicit instructions which he had – oh so thoughtfully – placed right in their path. I am surely not the only one unable to see lines in the Bible like “and I shall make you give birth under almost impossible conditions because my research has shown me that eggs and pouches ain’t that great after all.” Or, maybe, the order is wrong and “he” came up with reptiles, birds and marsupials later and just didn’t want to go through the hassle of wiping out all humans and starting afresh. Oh, hang on, no – he did do that with the flood, but he still decided to keep enough of the badly designed ones so that everything he caused the flood to eliminate would still be there afterwards. Smart move, that.
I have long thought that the only reason theology exists is to try to get around the glaringly obvious places in which religion doesn’t work. No wonder so many religious people are also against ID; it’s such an unbelievable mess. Just like the idea of design only makes things more difficult because the designer is even more difficult to explain, ID is trying to blur the borders between two completely different things: what we’ve understood from our observations and what some of us believe regardless of our observations. Only as long as those things are really kept completely separate can believers indulge themselves. Invade scientific territory and it all collapses. Theology is problematic enough when it’s only trying to reconcile religion to its own internal inconsistencies and contradictions; mix the real world into it and it becomes a real joke.
While an amusing essay, more openly Christian apologists do have a ready “answer” to this argument-the current crummy state of the world reflects “the fall” of mankind.
As ID advocates cannot directly acknowledge their ties to Creationism, then they cannot use this obvious “answer,” although I bet this is what is being discussed internally by the Creationists.
Stewart: you had the same idea, more eloquently and completely expresssed :)
Brian,
Yeah, we crossed, but it’s more than ok, because you came from the opposite direction, pointing out, if I may slightly rephrase, that ID “winning” would have been dreadful news for religion, making it forfeit its explanations for so much. If ID was trying to sneak in via “gaps” in evolutionary theory, the reverse scenario would be so much worse – for them. ID “winning” would have meant all those huge swathes of science accepted by ID would still be standing (without them ID rests on precisely zero – as opposed to almost nothing), but religion would have lost its main non-scientific reasons for existence. To put it yet another way, ID can’t even begin to make any of its claims without admitting that most of science works. Alright, let’s accept ID and have them use their “science” to explain the pre-Fall from Grace human reproductive system. Talk about gaps in the fossil record…
It’s precisely what you said, though, that should make religion an even bigger enemy of ID than science is: it threatens to undercut religion’s moral raison d’etre in a way science needn’t. Keep them separate and you can still say (if you absolutely must): “I accept all of science except I believe it had a divine initiator, which invalidates none of our observations.” Mix them and you lose religion-based morality and very dark suspicions about the Intelligent Designer’s integrity and intelligence start to become issues.
Actually, though, come to think of it…
ID goes on about Irreducible Complexity and then goes on to be hazy about the identity of the Designer. A non-god designer could be very good but not perfect. But that won’t wash if it is god. I’m not just repeating the sensible things OB and others have written. I’m saying that unlike acceptance of science, acceptance of ID does necessarily constitute explicit rejection of god. If Irreducible Complexity is evidence of a Designer then every imperfection in creation is screaming out that it isn’t god. The amusing idea then suggests itself that the Designer with all the imperfections (the one who was so busy getting the bacterial flagellum right that he didn’t have time to straighten out human childbirth) is not god, but god still exists at a higher level, having sub-contracted the stuff we can see to the less godlike entity he also created, except not very well. If the ID movement is on the right track, its favourite movie should be “Time Bandits.”
So, to cap this off, Judge Jones really did get it right: while science certainly helps in making god redundant, it isn’t unavoidably irreconcilable to the possibility he might exist, if you desperately want to believe in him and limit him to the things outside observable reality. Evolution might therefore be able to co-exist with god (or vice versa), but ID doesn’t have a hope in hell of pulling off that trick. If you need to believe in god, you’re way better off with evolution than you are with ID.
Post-cap-off:
Needless to say, the above speculations are all rendered as redundant as god since the Wedge document was accepted as authentic by the Judge and it’s a patent admission that ID was never intended to be science itself, merely a tool to try and demolish as much of real science as it could, which, unfortunately for ID, necessitated stepping on science’s turf, where guessing the contents of a closed box is not generally considered as reliable a means for determining its contents as opening it up and looking inside.
Rather a long quote, but covers the ground, I think;
“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else, He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of their power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Schiesskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us about bodily dangers.”
“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded, He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?”
“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”
“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupified with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power he had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious. He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!”
“And why can’t we fly?” etc. Obviously we were the first shot, before He tackled mosquitos and aphids.
“but god still exists at a higher level, having sub-contracted the stuff we can see to the less godlike entity he also created, except not very well.”
The Gnostic heretics would, to simplify, agree with this.
And, they would agree with Don’s quote as well- the “Demiurge” Creator Jehovah of our physical world is seen as a fallen, flawed, even perhaps evil fragment-and His creation reflects this flawed, even evil nature.
Sorry, OB for bringing in obscure theology :)
I’m wondering if the concept of irreducible complexity is really coherent. It seems to me (but perhaps I lack the requisite imagination) that there is no complex object that cannot be analyzed into simpler components. Not even Paley’s watch is irreducibly complex.
I think the irreducibility is more important than the complexity here. It isn’t a question of not being able to break something down into smaller components, it’s the claim that the existing combination does something that it couldn’t if even the tiniest element were missing. This is what Behe et al wave in the air as if it necessarily had to mean that none of the parts could have evolved for other purposes before becoming useful for its present function.
A simplified example may help to illustrate this point. Imagine you have a table with one leg too short by the precise height of a non-functioning VCR you have lying around the house, so you stick that under the shorter leg to make it stable. If Michael Behe visited you and saw this arrangement, he would, according to the way he has so far expressed himself, be unable to grasp that it was at one time possible to hook the VCR up to your TV monitor and play VHS (or perhaps Betamax) tapes in it. If, in an attempt to make him see the true state of affairs, you took him next door where your neighbour has a still-functioning VCR of the identical model, he would still not believe you and dismiss what you’d shown him with “not good enough.” Nor would he believe you could ever have made any use of the table if it had had the slight lean it would have without the VCR under its leg.