God’s attributes

Let’s assume that God exists.  Let us also imagine that God did not write a book that described his wonderful attributes.  We would then be in the position of learning about God based solely on what he created.

If we look for God’s attributes based only on what he created, what would we conclude?

God is a fan of extreme sports

If you look around, you will see living things in violent, bloody competition of survival.  I would conclude that God enjoys extreme sports.  Think about it.  If you were to design a world with different living creatures, would you put them in survival competition against each other?  Imagine you created different types of artificial intelligence with unique purposes.  Picture robots performing different functions.  Would you create them in such a way where they have to try and destroy each other to survive?  Of course not. Not unless you enjoyed the battles (which is possible).

In response to this argument, one of my friends said “living things live and die… that’s the natural cycle of things.”  It seems natural to us, because that is what we know.  It doesn’t have to be that we though.  God could have created a world where animals weren’t trying to eat each other. 

Someone pointed out to me that all living things used to be peaceful, until the original sin ruined it all (I’m paraphrasing).  Apparently tigers used to be herbivores?  I don’t know.   However, we wouldn’t know that the world used to be a peaceful place had God not written a book telling us how wonderful he is.  

God is a poor engineer by human standards

Many living things are poorly designed.  You can find a long list here.  For example:

Crowded teeth and poor sinus drainage, as human faces are significantly flatter than those of other primates and humans share the same tooth set. This results in a number of problems, most notably with wisdom teeth.

Or this:

Male beetles of several Callosobruchus species have sharp edges on their sperm-delivery organs. The females’ ducts grow a bit of extra toughening but not enough to make sex safe from the risk of injury.

God is cruel

Even if you accept the premise that it is necessary for animals to kill each other in order to ‘maintain balance’ (which I don’t), you would still have to conclude that there is a lot of suffering that is completely unnecessary.  A designer who found it necessary to have animals kill each other could still have had them anesthetize their prey first.

Why is our conception of God different?

Most people think of God as loving, pure and just.  Why?  If we look at nature, that is not what we see.  Our opinion about God is apparently strictly based on what we learned about him from the book(s) he his written (or movies he has directed).  Should the inconsistency between what we see and what we are told be a concern for those who are searching for truth?

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Creationist arguments

If you visit creationist websites, or discuss evolution with the ID crowd, you’ll see/hear arguments about why evolution couldn’t be true.  I was glad to see Steven Novella refute the most common claims made against evolution.  The most common one I have heard is that evolution does not increase genetic information, and therefore macroevolution (a popular term by the ID/creationist folks) is impossible.  Steven dismantles this claim:

All mutations increase genetic information…  If you start with one version of a gene and then it mutates in one offspring but not in another – now you have two versions of that gene. That represents an increase in information. Also, entire genes may be duplicated in the reproductive process. If you start with one copy of a gene and end up with two copies – that is an increase in information. This is especially pertinent to evolution, because one copy can continue to perform its original function while the redundant copy is free to mutate and evolve a new function.

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The idea that natural selection removes variation from the gene pool is true but a non sequitur. Mutations, duplication, and recombination increase information and increase variation and then natural selection causes differential survival of that variation which is better adapted to its niche.

The whole post is worth a read, if you are interested in the topic.  As tempting as it is to ignore creationist arguments, we need to keep refuting them.  Especially when 39% of US adults believe it’s ‘definitely true’ that ”God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”

update:  you can watch Intelligent Design on Trial (h/t Jim Emerson)

update 2:  new gallop poll on evolution

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Evolution

I like this essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky.  He starts off by pointing out the following:

But when you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don’t fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits.  Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes.  Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?

When I design a toaster oven, I don’t design one part that tries to get electricity to the coils and a second part that tries to prevent electricity from getting to the coils.  It would be a waste of effort.  Who designed the ecosystem, with its predators and prey, viruses and bacteria?  Even the cactus plant, which you might think well-designed to provide water fruit to desert animals, is covered with inconvenient spines.

The ecosystem would make much more sense if it wasn’t designed by a unitary Who, but, rather, created by a horde of deities – say from the Hindu or Shinto religions.  This handily explains both the ubiquitous purposefulnesses, and the ubiquitous conflicts:  More than one deity acted, often at cross-purposes.  The fox and rabbit were both designed, but by distinct competing deities.  I wonder if anyone ever remarked on the seemingly excellent evidence thus provided for Hinduism over Christianity.  Probably not.

Evolution basically follows a greedy algorithm, which we know often doesn’t lead to optimal outcomes.  The human retina is a good example of this:

The human retina is constructed backward:  The light-sensitive cells are at the back, and the nerves emerge from the front and go back through the retina into the brain.  Hence the blind spot.  To a human engineer, this looks simply stupid – and other organisms have independently evolved retinas the right way around.  Why not redesign the retina?

The problem is that no single mutation will reroute the whole retina simultaneously.  A human engineer can redesign multiple parts simultaneously, or plan ahead for future changes.  But if a single mutation breaks some vital part of the organism, it doesn’t matter what wonderful things a Fairy could build on top of it – the organism dies and the genes decreases in frequency.

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 Evolution has no foresight, it is simply the frozen history of which organisms did in fact reproduce.  Evolution is as blind as a halfway-redesigned retina.

Organisms were not intelligently designed.  But maybe that’s not so bad?  As Eliezer concludes:

Well, more power to us humans.  I like having a Creator I can outwit.  Beats being a pet. 

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