The Argument from Life – particularly human
life – is one of the go-to arguments for a theist’s insistence that a
‘designer’ exists. (Naturally, their own designer; never anyone else’s.)
Teaching A&P and human anatomy such as I do, it is quite apparent that if
anyone did design the human body, they did a piss poor job of it. When you
consider all the things that can go wrong with the human body, to say nothing
of the malfunctions that afflict the supposedly wondrous brain alone, and it
seems odd to me that anyone would consider the human body designed. Sure, how
the kidneys balance bodily fluids and monitor blood pressure is amazing, but
the process is so convoluted that kidneys actually seem to have arisen by
chance. Being undersigned, the human body is the biological equivalent of a ’71
Ford Pinto, a vehicle that would burst into flames if you happened to tap it
with a feather.
As always, one should have evidence for their
assertions. Fortunately, a lot of this work has been done for me. Allow me to point
you in the direction of some articles that lament the failure of God’s design:
https://www.quora.com/Science-of-Everyday-Life/What-are-the-greatest-flaws-of-the-human-body (Includes a section with comments from many biologists)
Granted, many of the articles speak of the same
design flaws, and this is because the design flaws are so egregious that they
can’t possibly go unnoticed. All of this points to the opposite of the Argument
from Life, the Argument from Poor Design, indicating there is no designer.
There are two possible objections to these many
foolish ‘designs.’ One is that the designer or designers did not see fit to
design the human body for optimum efficiency. Human beings are well known for
creating things that perform sub-optimally, but this is always due to either a
lack of knowledge or resources, or is done out of plain ol’ greed. If we are
anything like our designer(s), this says something about them. If it’s the case
that we just don’t know the reason why we were created for sub-optimal
performance, there is no reason to assume any such designer(s) had noble
intentions. Even if it were the case that the designer(s) had designed some
non-optimal features to improve the overall quality of the human body, this
might indicate the incompetence of the designer(s), being or beings that are
often regarded as omniscient. The worst flaw of all, death, has always afflicted human beings, even Adam
and Eve upon their very creation! If human beings were designed, they might as
well have been iPhones, with their obsolescence built in.
The second objection is that human disease is
the result of sin.* This is quite obviously ridiculous since babies who are
baptized have their sins taken away but still may become sick at a moment’s
notice (or are baptized when sick, and are still sick immediately thereafter). People
are also noticeable sick after confession, which supposedly asks for the
forgiveness of sins. Of course, the designer(s) could never have allowed for
sin, which even the dumbest engineer would have agreed seemed like a good idea.
[* Speaking from a fundamentalist Christian
perspective]
“Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think
that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of
species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion
stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies,
all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes
all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and
anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was
designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed
just for us?” Michael Shermer in Why
Darwin Matters
Ah, yes, cognitive bias, one of the worst ‘design’
flaws of all.
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