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MikeG, are you asserting that an omniscient, omnipotent entity could not have found a more intelligent way to construct a planet, so that the things we need are placed conveniently for our use?
What kinda bumbling idiot do you take that entity to be, anyway?
Yes I have always thought this an interesting question. Does God have sexual apparatus for example? If so what does he use it for - apart from banging Mary 2000 years ago.
Why do we have a molten core and tectonic plates, that move against each other causing earthquakes? In addition to this our spinning is slowing down, due to the friction of all that molten stuff, being pulled around by gravitational pulls from the Sun and Moon. I would have made our planet out of solid rock.
You are referring to those cosmic rays that would wipe us out no doubt. Couldn't God just wiggle his nose and get rid of them however?
Instead of just making things simple to start with, (the essence of good design is simplicity), we have all these complex situations we must provide other complex solution for.
The obvious one for me is the respiratory system. We evolved from four-legged mammals, their lungs drained out easily. Then we took to two feet , this meant that all of the mucus and crap migrated into our lungs. If we were designed , then we were designed to have respiratory diseases!
The lower back doesn't appear to be a great design, and I've been waiting days for one of our female members to describe the mis-match between a baby's head and the birth canal, let alone the odd angle that human babies have to navigate before they draw their first breath.
There are features that evolutionary theory can predict wouldn't happen, just as there are features which one wouldn't expect of a benign and competent designer. Let alone an omnscient and benign designer.
Evolutionary theory would predict that if there is sufficient selective advantage, certain traits would evolve independently on several occasions.
If a trait evolves in one organism its descendents may or may not have this trait, but you would not expect to see this trait being suddenly "reused" in its entirety in another, unrelated organism, as opposed to evolving independently inboth cases.
Something that evolutionary theory would predict to not occur:
Luckily we now have some examples of intelligent design:
The important point here is that this mouse has the same 700-letter sequence as the jellyfish Green Fluorescent Protein, including those parts of the sequence which are unimportant.
That wouldn't have happened by chance, so it is safe to conclude that this was an intelligent designer reusing the jellyfish GFP gene-sequence.
Lateral transimssion of genes has been observed, but the sudden appearence of a fluorescent mouse, and genes from a jellyfish without many other interveaning organisms would militate against this being natural.
An omniscient and benign designer would get things right first time, if such a designer was also competent.
So lets remove omniscience, as even Behe agrees that there has been incremental improvement...
If a competant designer manages to design something, then this designer does not waste effort redesigning the same feature from scratch every time, but reuses as much of the design as possible.
There are many examples of organisms that have independentently evolved extra sets of eyes, but didn't "reuse" their original "design" of eye. The mammal retina is poorly designed compared to the squid's. A competent designer would not waste all that effort to redisgn something and then get parts of it wrong.
So lets remove competent and benign.
That leaves us with an incompetent and/or malign designer, or none at all...
Incompatibility of blood groups has been mentioned already, but we also need to acknowledge that the immune systems is so designed to attack tissue from other humans, despite the fact that one human cannot be a parasite or pathogen within another human.
If we are to believe that an intelligent designer made us, then we would have to ask WTF he was smoking at the time.
David Attenborough has mentioned river blindness as another example.
My new favourite is the recent discovery that the fungal parasite which invades ants and makes it climb high before bursting out of its head doesn't hijack the brain... just disconnect the brain from the muscles and controls its muscles.
David Attenborough has mentioned river blindness as another example.
My new favourite is the recent discovery that the fungal parasite which invades ants and makes it climb high before bursting out of its head doesn't hijack the brain... just disconnect the brain from the muscles and controls its muscles.
I would hesitate, though, to call this evidence of "unintelligent design". At most, it's evidence of evil design, as if the designer wanted his creatures to bring maximum suffering on each other (but then, we knew that already, the first 40-or-so books written about this purported designer witness his lust for blood and mass murder across the spectrum of species kinds).
And the lifecycle of that Cordyceps fungus parasite is child's play compared to that of Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, which has over half a dozen life stages and lives in very particular parts of both its mosquito and its human host. I'm frankly surprised that Behe et.al. haven't already yelled "irreducible complexity" about that.
I would hesitate, though, to call this evidence of "unintelligent design". At most, it's evidence of evil design, as if the designer wanted his creatures to bring maximum suffering on each other (but then, we knew that already, the first 40-or-so books written about this purported designer witness his lust for blood and mass murder across the spectrum of species kinds).
And the lifecycle of that Cordyceps fungus parasite is child's play compared to that of Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, which has over half a dozen life stages and lives in very particular parts of both its mosquito and its human host. I'm frankly surprised that Behe et.al. haven't already yelled "irreducible complexity" about that.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -- From a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860
That blogpost also has some amusing "explanations" from the apologetics, ranging from "it's Adam's fault" to "God is a sadist" to "God is powerless against the laws of nature" (what?).
Apropos cats and mice: do you know if that green-glowing mouse in your previous post is commercially available? My two cats have become quite the couch potatoes.
I presume you mean the quote that's cited here on the blog "Dwindling in Unbelief":
That blogpost also has some amusing "explanations" from the apologetics, ranging from "it's Adam's fault" to "God is a sadist" to "God is powerless against the laws of nature" (what?).
Apropos cats and mice: do you know if that green-glowing mouse in your previous post is commercially available? My two cats have become quite the couch potatoes.
"I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing."
As an aside, the mouse was someone else's avatar at Badscience, we chose them because someone was arguing that there were no differences between inherited and acquired characteristics - my mouse had a rather obvious acquired characteristic, whilst the other mouse had a rather obvious inherited characteristic... or it would have done if it had been real (which I later discovered several years later).
There are GFP mice, and the very obvious GFP rabbit (Alba, picture here)
Except on Dutch TV. In the Netherlands, the evangelical broadcaster EO bought the TV rights and they excised all references to evolution. Here's a list of changes in the first 6 minutes of episode 2, as compiled by Dutch biology professor Gerdien de Jong. Sir David was not amused when he heard of this; I hope the BBC has changed the licensing contracts since then. The EO regularly broadcasts nature documentaries; I stopped looking at them when I was 12 or so and was disappointed that after beautiful nature scenery, in the last five minutes they trotted out their imaginary friend.
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