And the LORD spake, saying “no, thou shalt be MY wingman, thou arrogant little prick.”
Uhm… yea and God said to Abraham; “You will kill your son Isaac.” And Abraham said, “I can’t hear You, you’ll have to speak into the microphone.” And God said, "I’m sorry, is this better? Check check… check. Jerry, pull the high end out, I’m still getting some hiss back here.
Ignore it, it’s just the serpent.
I guess the OP is serious in the contention that the creation we are experiencing is poorly designed. I started to engage in a serious debate of that assumption, but I see most of the posters here are sharp enough to grasp the futility of such a task, and opted for humor instead.
Wise move.
I’ll just repeat something Truman Capote replied to people who always had suggestions for how he could have written better:
“Where were you when the page was blank?”
I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect Truman Capote wasn’t omnipotent. 
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”
Problem is, this doesn’t rebut the claim that the earth’s foundation is not well-laid. It shifts, erodes, bumps and humps, lifts, falls, and occasionally explodes.
Truman Capote is a pretty good writer; how about J. Andrew Craphack…or James Fenimore Cooper? “Where were you when the page was blank?” Sir, I was writing something better than you ever aspired to.
Okay, so either:
A. Create a world and we’ll compare it to this one.
B. Provide another existing world for comparison.
You see, it doesn’t do to just pick individual features and claim it could have been done better. You have to show that the change results in a better total entity. Kind of like souping up the engine in your car will cause the drive train to deteriorate sooner if that isn’t re-engineered as well.
Are you suggesting that God isn’t omnipotent? Because omnipotent beings don’t have design considerations. Everything is exactly the way they want it to be. They don’t cut weight or balance options. It just falls in line with what they want.
That’s the definition of omnipotence.
Fine. So by your definition of omnipotence, this world is the best that can be done by an omnipotent being. So we’re back where we started. How could a non-omnipotent being possible improve upon it?
Not at all. We don’t know that he wanted to do his best. Maybe He’s cruel. Maybe He’s insane. Maybe He literally is as smart as a young child.
If God existed, and was omnipotent the only thing this world would tell us about Him is that He isn’t all-loving. An all-loving God doesn’t generate needless suffering.
That said, it’s not my definition of omnipotent. God could certainly not be omnipotent, maybe this world is the best He could do because He had design considerations. Maybe the laws of physics were hardwired and He couldn’t change them. Maybe He had to go with evolution because He doesn’t have the capacity to dictate so many small elements simultaneously.
Or maybe, more likely He doesn’t exist at all.
I have no issue with any of these conjectures. You’re the one who raised the issue of omnipotence, so I presumed that was your position. And you did offer a particular definition of omniipotence, which I don’t find verbatim in any regular reference, so I ascribed authorship to you.
But all of that is beside the point. This thread is about the quality of design and engineering of our world. My point, if I have to spell it out is this:
We are all elements of the creation. None of us has the perspective to criticize the creation as a whole. We can only examine local details. We have no way of knowing how the changes we would make, believing them to be improvements, would affect the entire creation.
Now, that just goes for us humans. In accordance with your openness to other views of godhood, there may be other god-beings who are capable of designing better worlds.
Anything we do as humans to affect the workings of the world at large is trial and error. If something better came of it in the larger view, it would be by accident.
No prob. Most of the issues addressed in this kind of debate stand on their own. The world’s ecosphere would not be changed in any significant way if the human retina was in front of the blood vessels feeding it…but our vision would be significantly improved.
“God’s” engineering fails in small details. The big overall picture is fairly pretty, but that’s to be expected in both evolution and creation models. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that we don’t really get anywhere admiring the curve of the dolphin’s back or the seagull’s wing. Instead, we note the screwy stuff, like Hens’ Teeth and Horses’ Toes (the title of one of Gould’s books.)
If the details are imperfect, then the totality is imperfect. And it is trivially easy to point to imperfect details.
Standard religious apologism. It bashes humans, sneering at thousands of years of progress as sheer luck that we “can’t know” is good or not; an example of how innately anti-human religion is. And it uses the old “unknowability” argument that virtually no one actually believes, but only brings out as a temporary talking point to use against skeptics. Anyone who took it seriously would have to admit that means that we can’t call “God”/gods good or assume that following him is a good or bad idea.
My post addresses the issue of knowledge and understanding. The religious context is because of the topic of the post. I would have the same position no matter what mechanism you use to explain the existence of the world.
We are discussing how it can be “improved” from the perspective of humans.
When you speak of “perfection”, that presumes an understanding of the intention/purpose of the design. Otherwise, how can you judge how “perfect” a thing is? How do you identify the “imperfections” as such?
When it comes to our existence, that understanding would fall in the category of Meaning of Life stuff. Do you claim to know the intended purpose of our existence?
I claim to know the purpose of the human retina. And it could be improved upon.
I am not a theist, I’m a devil’s advocate; putting that out there now before people who hate anything religious jump down my throat.
That said, assuming God exists for this argument, he specifically designed us in the material world, within the laws of the physical universe (excepting the soul, depending on your exact beliefs, etc). He could have designed us outside it, but he didn’t. We can know that, because we are limited to the physical. It doesn’t matter why for this argument, because we’re arguing about the design of the human body as it is, not the nature or reason of its corporeal existence.
Therefore, if he gave us the armor to protect ourselves from road rash, which does not exist in the natural world anyway, it would have removed some of our mobility through increased weight, and increased our energy requirements, necessitating more food that may not be available, thus limiting our range of natural environments to those which provide it in sufficient quantity. Or you could reduce the energy expenditure of some other facility, such as our intelligence.
He could have created environments that would have satisfied those energy requirements, but why? To prevent injury from something that he wouldn’t know* would happen?
*If I were a theist, and I believed in an “omnipotent” god, it would be in the classical sense of the word (“having all [practical] power”) that existed before the enlightenment, not the more modern sense of “literally without limitation”. There is no scripture that I am aware of that shows God to be able to predict or know the future with any more certainty than peoples’ own predictions (outside of things he himself did), so I would reject unlimited omniscience when it came to knowledge of the future, or an ability to read a person’s thoughts. These beliefs are, however, consistent with (at least European) catholic dogma.
Again, how would you create a system to A) form a hand of your own design that fulfills all the same uses our natural ones have and B) integrate that synthetic hand with our natural nervous system? I’m not saying this as a challenge, but as an exercise. How would you design it better? It’s simple to say defecation is stupid, and we should be perfect in energy usage, but that violates the laws of thermodynamics - specifically entropy. It’s like saying cars are stupid because they produce exhaust. Waste energy is a fact of existence. There can be no perfect system, because energy, potential, time, etc are all inherently imperfect by implying change. You can try to limit it, but how? How would one make the human body more efficient?
Some should be unfit to begin with because they represent potential. If the tables turn, suddenly they may have the upper hand. Our world is consistent enough for those we consider unfit to have held that classification for as long as we have history, but there’s no guarantee in science or religion that tomorrow, the sun could turn purple and the laws of physics could start to break down. The future is inherently unknowable. In the not so distant past, being obese was a good thing, because it represented an environment that supplied more than enough energy to sustain life. Agricultural advances made nearly all environments able to supply more than enough food, and being obese ceased to be a measure of success. And now that we know of the health effects it does have, it has became a mark of poor health.
The world as we had known it, and understood its rules, had changed.
For those with genetic diseases that result from chromosome damage or mutation, or instances such as down’s syndrome that are a result of too many chromosomes, it’s of course the result of (direct or indirect) imperfect DNA transcription; and call me a monster, but I’d rather take the few unfit to save the race than have everyone die from the flu in 4000 BC.
I’m not sure what you mean by slaughter being inherent in the design. Is this in reference to war? Callousness to those who are “unfit”?
The mental outlook? I’m again not sure what you mean - in reference to Abrahamic religions? Our inaction in the face of suffering?
Either way, the real point of my argument is two-fold:
A) That there can logically be no perfect system in an environment defined in large part by change.
B) That our bodies represent a very efficient machine given the situation of the world at the time we evolved, and the tasks it was required to accomplish to sustain its own existence. Efficiency of automation, you could say.
Agreed that no system can be perfect. What demonstrates evolution – and disproves the notion of an “engineer” or “intelligent designer” – are those things in nature that are obviously imperfect. Those things that even a human engineer could do better.
And, yes, definitely the mammalian body plan is a marvel of efficiency. It works well on land, in the sea, and even in the air. However, in the latter two environments, it is clearly a kludge! The whale’s pelvis and the bat’s finger bones are clear indications of jerry-built design, of hasty adaption of pre-existing structures for new purposes.
Would a human engineer, building a nuclear reactor, include andirons, a spark screen, an ash-grate, and a smoke-damper? Yet this is (metaphorically) what “God” has done in animal engineering.
I see you chose to totally ignore the point I raised here, So I’ll raise it again.
Lets say you improve human vision so that we can see things that are outside of our current visual spectrum.
Lets take it further. Let’s say you improve human hearing so that we can hear a broader range of frequencies.
One consequence would be that now you are bombarded with more visual and auditory stimulus that requires your attention. You now have to devote more attention to interpreting these stimuli, which could lead to sensory overload because the rest of your system is not currently designed to handle this level of input.
This current design reflects an understanding of the larger environment in which we exist. Your focus is on the details to the exclusion of this broader understanding. That’s where I contend that you do not have the wisdom and understanding to determine which changes will truly be overall improvements.