Since I moved to the Freethought Blogs network, I have a bunch of new readers who aren’t familiar with my greatest hits from my old, pre-FTB blog. So I’m linking to some of them, about one a day, to introduce them to the new folks.
Today’s archive treasure: Why “Life Has To Have Been Designed” Is a Terrible Argument for God’s Existence. The tl;dr: A lot of arguments for religion aren’t even arguments: they’re deflections, excuses for why the believer isn’t making an argument, bigoted insults, expressions of wishful thinking, complaints that atheists are mean bad people to even ask for an argument, heartfelt wishes that atheists would just shut up. But some believers do take the question “Why do you believe in God?” seriously. So I want to address those arguments, and dismantle them into tiny tiny pieces. In this post — the second of a series — I dismantle the argument from design.
A nifty pull quote:
Not to be snarky, but: Have you heard of this Darwin fellow?
Enjoy!
Good summary of why the Argument for Design is redundant, but the fact that we have an alternative explanation for life’s complexity and diversity with much greater explanatory power is only one reason for rejecting it. The fact is that it’s not a very good argument to begin with.
One could also have said:
Not to be snarky, but: Have you heard of this Hume fellow?
Or indeed anyone else, from J.S. Mill to Anthony Flew, who has highlighted its flaws.
PS – just to be an annoying pedant, but it ought to be the Argument for Design, or the Argument to Design. “Argument from Design” implies that the existence of design is the premise of the argument, when it’s actually the conclusion. Mind you, since most forms of the argument indulge in a fair amount of question-begging, maybe “Argument from Design” isn’t that misleading after all …
You clearly haven’t heard “Improbable Joe’s Bugs Bunny argument for the nonexistence of God” yet. 🙂
Let us assume a God that is either “omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent” or some reasonable approximation of such. Then, consider what we understand of design and the way that designs are refined and improved over time. We understand that better designs include fewer moving parts, become smaller and weigh less, and require less energy to run. A perfect design in human terms would require the least moving parts possible, the smallest and lightest physical profile possible, and needing only that amount of energy required to run with the least possible waste or heat produced.
So, a perfect (or nearly so) being? It would have to be able to produce a design that is capable of no actual moving parts, being two dimensional and more or less weightless, and requiring no input of energy or excretion of waste.
Bugs Bunny!
Bugs has no internal organs to speak of. He is more or less two dimensional, and has whatever weight or lack thereof that he needs in any given circumstance. He chomps on carrots, but do we ever see him swallow, let alone poop? NO!
Any argument for complexity is an argument against any of the general “3 omni’s” gods. A more powerful god would have created without complexity, at least without the inefficient complexity of biology. Or, to put it another way: do angels have assholes? If not, why? If “God” can create a being that doesn’t need to eat and poop, the existence of digestion and excretion are arguments against that “God.”