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What you could do better than god

HansMustermann said:
Could I or you do a better design if either of us was God? Quite obviously yes.
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You are assuming God can do anything. This is not correct.

Because nature doesn't roll back and re-evolve something from scratch. It just piles up hacks on top of old hacks. If that nerve went that way in fish, that's the way it will always go. But if you were to actually be God and design it, you could achieve the same function with a lot less nerve.
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Again, you assume God could just 'design' a fish and have it turn out 'perfect'. But such a God wouldn't even create that fish in the first place. I mean, if He could do anything then He could design fish with no nerves at all, and that don't need to eat other fish, or live in water, or any of the other things about fish that aren't as 'good' as you imagine they could be. A 'perfect' fish would be an incredible fantasy very different to a real fish - so fantastic that we might not even recognize it as a fish.

You say that if you were God you could just wave your magic wand and do anything you imagine, but how do you know that? We know the real world doesn't work that way. If God exists then He is constrained by reality. If He created the Universe then He made it in a way that uses evolution - not magic - to produce fish and humans. And having done that it might not be possible for Him to change the course of evolution without breaking it in ways we can't even imagine.

The things you think are so important that He should meddle with evolution may not be. Are humans the end goal? That's highly unlikely. More likely we are just another small step along the way, no more important than fish or microbes. Just look at what has evolved so far, and consider the amount 'discomfort' that has caused to the creatures it produced. Clearly avoiding discomfort was not part of the plan. And why should it be? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
 
God got sick of his estranged SO, Mother Nature, complaining about all His time in the workshop creating His perfect works. So He says, "You know somethin? Why don't you take a crack at it with your evolution and natural selection and come back and tell me how easy it is?"
 
I could punish people way better that God. (I assume were talking about YHWH.) None of this eternal damnation and suffering for nothing more than not being perfect, or for not perpetually kissing my arse to massage my omnipotent, but oh so fragile self-esteem. "Did you make a decent effort to better yourself? Did you try to make other's lives better? Welcome to eternal paradise! Pub's on the left, and your pets are waiting for you in the park. Did it all just fall apart for you? Come on in and have some ice cream. We'll make it up to you."

And people who were genuinely evil - who caused suffering out of hate and selfishness - would have to experience the pain they'd caused to others before they could enter paradise. So people like Pol Pot or Hitler would have to feel the suffering they'd caused to millions of people before they could start their eternity of peace. It would take millions.of years. But even they would eventually get in.
 
Thermal said:
Maybe move the waste excreting apparatus a little further from the playground, too.
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I'd thought of that old joke - 'snack bar next to the rest rooms' - , but there's actually validity of that beyond the LOL factor. If a perfect being had designed anatomy then why would one need to wipe in a specific direction?

But to go back - eating wrong might make you choke. Vomiting in your sleep might make you choke. Seems like an easy fix for an omnipotent designer. Of course if we had blow holes in the back of our necks we'd Rule 34 the hell out of them, but at least we wouldn't run the risk of dying just by putting stuff into the Munching Cave.
 
Oh, and if we're not just limiting ourselves to design issues but just general 'god issues' then ...

Tell people in plain speak who I am, what I want, and identify who doesn't speak for me. "It's a mystery" would never be the answer to a question put to me.

And on a petty level I'd smite people who read thesarui but don't understand them. That'd be like my one sin.
 
Pretty much the most succinct and to the point explanation of what this thread is about.
 
A doctor could probably come up with a more comprehensive list, but here are a few problems with the human body as currently engineered:
  • We have two eye and ears (good for binocular vision and directional hearing) as well as two lungs, two kidneys, two testicles/ovaries, and one heart. If it stops, everything starts dying pretty quickly. Why not a second heart as well, a la Doctor Who?
  • Human eyes have nerve fibres in front of the retina, creating a blind spot that the brain has to fill in. The octopus eye has these behind the retina and hence no blind spot. And it can also detect polarized light.
  • Also, a misshapen eye can cause near-sightedness or far-sightedness. Maybe add some more muscles so the eye can be reshaped?
  • Islets of Langerhans: a small part of the pancreas that produces insulin, vital for human well-being. One infection there and you're type 1 diabetic, which until a century ago was a death sentence. This vital hormone should be produced in more than one place, in the same way red blood cells are manufactured in the bones.
  • There's very large artery from the heart down to the abdomen, and an equally large vein to return blood to the heart. If either gets cut the person bleeds out pretty quickly, which is why a gunshot to the torso is often fatal.
  • Our spinal cord did not evolve to be upright; it started out more or less horizontal to the ground. There is probably room for improvement in its engineering.
  • Although I'm unsure of how they would work together, distributing a lot of the functions of the brain around the body would make it more resilient against damage.
  • Overall, running pretty much everything needed for survival through the neck seems like a bad idea.
  • We can't sense the Earth's magnetic field, making it harder for us to navigate.
 
There are some 'Trurl and Klapaucius' (The Cyberiad) short stories by Stanislav Lem, in which the two wizard-engineers build worlds to improve on what God has made.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
There are some 'Trurl and Klapaucius' (The Cyberiad) short stories by Stanislav Lem, in which the two wizard-engineers build worlds to improve on what God has made.
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I LOVE The Cyberiad. Kandel's translation managed to convert clever Polish wordplay into clever English wordplay, which is not an easy trick to pull off.
 
Assuming we're talking about the Biblical God, I wouldn't trust my words to be held by one small (and initially nomadic) tribe in the Middle East. I'd come up with a way to make sure they were scattered widely in a very noticeable fashion, like being carved into easily visible cliff faces, updated as needed as times and languages change.

I'd also be available to leaders , most likely through proxies like angels, all of which are easily identifiable and are more or less impervious to harm. And, of course, if you asked a lot of them a certain question, they would all give the same answer.

I'd also be visible and constantly travelling, so you would hear on the news, "Today God met at the White House with U.S. President Joe Biden, appeared at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, then made a trip to Moscow where he visibly smote Russian President Vladmir Putin. Elections for a new president of Russia are currently being organized."

A lot of the human world's problems could be sorted out if psychopaths could be prevented from gaining power or could be swiftly eliminated if they somehow managed to. And if I was powerful enough to create the universe and know when even a sparrow falls, surely I could do a better job of directing the weather. No more droughts or floods; storms remain at sea and don't make landfall; and tornadoes steer around inhabited places.
 
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Blue Mountain said:
Assuming we're talking about the Biblical God, I wouldn't trust my words to be held by one small (and initially nomadic) tribe in the Middle East. I'd come up with a way to make sure they were scattered widely in a very noticeable fashion, like being carved into easily visible cliff faces, updated as needed as times and languages change.
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Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.
 
Kinda Blue Mountain's point, I think. If we're talking a powerful enough God, he'd figure something out.
 
Blue Mountain said:
A doctor could probably come up with a more comprehensive list, but here are a few problems with the human body as currently engineered:
  • We have two eye and ears (good for binocular vision and directional hearing) as well as two lungs, two kidneys, two testicles/ovaries, and one heart. If it stops, everything starts dying pretty quickly. Why not a second heart as well, a la Doctor Who?
  • Human eyes have nerve fibres in front of the retina, creating a blind spot that the brain has to fill in. The octopus eye has these behind the retina and hence no blind spot. And it can also detect polarized light.
  • Also, a misshapen eye can cause near-sightedness or far-sightedness. Maybe add some more muscles so the eye can be reshaped?
  • Islets of Langerhans: a small part of the pancreas that produces insulin, vital for human well-being. One infection there and you're type 1 diabetic, which until a century ago was a death sentence. This vital hormone should be produced in more than one place, in the same way red blood cells are manufactured in the bones.
  • There's very large artery from the heart down to the abdomen, and an equally large vein to return blood to the heart. If either gets cut the person bleeds out pretty quickly, which is why a gunshot to the torso is often fatal.
  • Our spinal cord did not evolve to be upright; it started out more or less horizontal to the ground. There is probably room for improvement in its engineering.
  • Although I'm unsure of how they would work together, distributing a lot of the functions of the brain around the body would make it more resilient against damage.
  • Overall, running pretty much everything needed for survival through the neck seems like a bad idea.
  • We can't sense the Earth's magnetic field, making it harder for us to navigate.
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Very good examples. Not the only ones in the thread, mind you, but a nice concentrated and well thought out list is always welcome.
 
To add a couple of medical ideas of my own:
  • Bleeding or swelling inside the skull can be fatal because the skull is rigid and has a fixed volume. So worst case scenario the brain gets damaged by being squeezed against the skull and worst case scenario it's squeezed like toothpaste through sutures and the eye sockets. Surely a designer could account for that in their design.
  • Along the same vein: compartment syndrome. It's a real emergency. The fascia around the leg muscles can only expand so much before muscles start to die. (E.g., in water retention, etc.) Which in turn, due to the proteins and iron ions from the myoglobin getting into the blood will damage the kidneys, potentially to the point of permanently disabling them. Like, just make the damn thing more elastic.
  • Even more along the same vein: why make kidneys that can't deal with muscle breakdown, if you know it's going to happen sooner or later?
  • While I understand why fever exists, and the function it's trying to do, why not put an upper limit so you don't get killed by it?
  • Kidney stones. Ouch. Any reason to not have an enzyme that can break down oxalates?
 
Let's say you had the power to change your children into anything you want: make them super-powerful, make them super-smart, super-confident, super-successful, no need for pain, no need to struggle. You can make it so they don't need anything. You could make them have a perfect body without working out. They could eat anything they wanted, or not even eat at all.

Any struggling that they do to get something they want is because you made it that way. Any pain that they feel is because you made it that way.

How would you remake your children? How much struggle for them to endure would you allow? How much pain would you allow? You wouldn't allow any, right?
 
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