You’ve probably read The Mage Wars series, right? Griffins were designed so that they had to be approved to have kids. Then they’d go through a religious and spiritual rite which would trigger their biology to be fertile. Your god may not be that meddling, but reproduction is still a biggie.
If you’re inventing a sentient/sapient species, you’d want to move back puberty, getting rid of the whole awkward horny teenager fiasco. You’d also want longer reproductive cycles, so you get a large number of childless family members looking after and teaching youngsters. It’d probably be a good idea to make these cycles the same in everyone in a generation, so that you get a bunch of children all at once. They can play with each other and be looked after by a large number of currently childless aunts/uncles/grandparents who are on a different cycle.
Also, how about herbs and medicines? People used to believe that God gave hints as to what a plant was good for. A plant that looks like a heart is good for the heart, etc. I’d expect that to be especially blatent, to the point where a plant may have the word “analgesic” written on its leaves. Especially if the natives use pictographs. (Imagine bark checkered with Chinese or something.)
I fly in airplanes much less often than I catch head colds or suffer through allergy seasons. Besides, if the design were “perfect,” then the designer would have thought of another way to relieve the pressure created by altitude change, or (alternately) artificial flight would never be invented.
I read all the posts about how if this world were really designed by some higher intelligence it would be more perfect. Here we are judging the Designer without knowing His intentions. Perhaps when you solve the problem of why this world came into being, and the purpose, or meaning of living here, then you can better judge whether the Designer made mistakes or whether there was a reason for all the things you complain about.
I have been told science doesn’t do whys. So we must go to other sources of knowledge to find our answers.
As the OP, I feel pretty safe in saying you’re hijacking my friend, dude. :mad:
I hate to aid and abet a hijacking, but let me point out a couple of things. You capitalize the word “Designer” and refer to the designer as “He.” I can’t help but read that as your using the word as code for God. You’re free to believe anything you want, of course; I wouldn’t try to stop you if I could. But if you want to argue against evolutionary theory and in favor of theistic creation, you might want to do so elsewhere; that’s not what this thread is about.
Just a thoght,
Maxie son of Sammie son of Henry son of Cyrus
I know this is meant to be facetious, but you actually bring up a good point. Software acquires junk code because software developers, however competent, are limited in knowledge, time, energy, and devotion. I’ve been assuming that the Designer of the Fabulous World, the God of the Fabulous Creatures, is necessarily an omniscient, omnibenevolent, et cetera personage like the God of Judeo-Christian myth. But if he’s simply MIGHTIER than the Creatures but not unbound – and, after all, he’s ultimately me–then the Fabulous Plane’s designer may be restricted in imagination or energy, even if he is effectively all-powerful within the Plane.
Can’t say I agree there. You seem to be assuming that any such designer would necessarily be like the God of the fundamentalist Christians: i.e., hell-bent on being worshipped and overly concerned with his creations utililization of their genitalia. But the designer might be – and I think the designer of the Fabulous Plane IS–just interested in creating a world to see what happens; it doesn’t give a damn about being worshipped.
But I’m confident that all Creation myths involve a God that has a purpose and wants his worshippers to behave in a certain way.
And that’s happening on a planet where there’s no evidence to support ID. In your beautifully designed World, won’t the inhabitants be drawn to thinking about who designed and created them?
My thinking on this is as follows, as relates to the OP:
If there is no Intelligent Design (or Designer), then our observations of the universe and of the life within it are as we perceive now.
If there is Intelligent Design and one or many Designers, but the Designer(s) is/are inscrutable to us, then there is no test we humans could conceive that would reveal his/her/its/their presence. This circumstance is indistinguishable from #1 above, and is therefore IMHO superfluous.
There is Intelligent Design, as is posited in the story in the OP, and the Designer(s) is/are scrutable. In this case, it should be conceivable that intelligent characters in this universe should/would/could probe the design of that universe from purely logical arguments. For example, the Ptolemaic cosmology was pleasing not just for its agreement with observation (something that in antiquity equally could be said for Copernicus’ heliocentric theory), but because it seemed to match logical expectations about the structure of our universe. Therefore, residents of this other universe should eschew experiment, or at the least prefer gedanken experiment to getting their hands dirty in the lab. I think this would lead to a different mind-set than is usual to most of us - “look/think before you act” vs. “roll up your sleeves.”
This is something I’m sure the gentlemen haven’t considered, but I’ve been known to. In a sensibly designed world (Ok, so I’m positing an intelligent, sensible designer), women wouldn’t menstruate. Trust me, guys, having a mixture of blood and other substances leaking from your body for 5 days a month is not pleasant. It can ruin clothes and I would think the scent of menstrual fluids would be very attractive to predators.
While we’re on the subject, I’d argue for a more practical system of predation. While it wouldn’t have to be the lion lying down with the lamb, it could be fun to see what system you could come up with.
OK, I will leave, just thought it logical to assume ID to mean higher intelligence or “God”. And it is pretty hard to determine whether something is made right without knowing what its purpose was.
In a universe with Intelligent Design, wouldn’t you have to attribute all sorts of nasty creatures to an Evil Creator or Corrupter, sort of like the Hebrews had a “Lord of the Flies”? Or would things like body lice, tapeworm. leeches, etc. be atrributed to spontaneous generation out of corruption (“rotting meat turns into maggots”, etc.)
I’d expect the eye to work differently. An ID’d retina might not invert the light coming into it, I figure that’s the result of the eye evolving gradually.
Actually, unless you changed the laws of physics, tghis is not a bad design at all – the eye is remarkably like a camera with a single main lens and a secondary corrector (although the two lenses are slightly aspheric and one has a gradient index profile, which is pretty siophisticated). The upside-down image is the easiest to prodice, as in a camera, and inverting the image requires use of a rather complicated design with another lens or a prism. It’s much easier o place an inverted sensor at the imag plane (be it film, a CCD array, or a retina of rods and cones) and do the inverting in the processing (flipping the developed film over, inverting the CCD image, or flipping the rod/cone output over) than to flip the image optically. The eye that we hav in vertebrates and cephalopods (the result of convergent evolution, if you’re one of those evolutionist types) is also what you’d expect from ID.