Intelligent design - stupid design

[Shuggy]

I thought a simple way to answer the Intelligent Designers (=Creation Scientists=Creationists=biblical literalists) was to take what we've got and design it better. Two cases in point: human birth and the human throat.

Doing what I do for a living just now (and at the risk of being accused of advertising), I've put my images on to products on sale at the Wero Shop. You'll have to click through products (I suggest the rectangle magnets) to see the larger images, but there's some explanatory text on the way and I think you'll agree it's worth it.

I'm about to start work on the really intelligently designed human eye, with the nerves running round the outside of the retina, and hence no blind spot. And if our design is so intelligent, why do we have toenails?

[starboardlight]

first of all, if it can't be tested scientifically, it can't be taught as science. plain and simple. you want to teach it in philosophy, fine. give it a try.

that still doesn't excuse the fact that the philosophy is based on faulty logic. one of the best answers I heard for "intelligent design" is that, just because something's been designed, doesn't mean there's a conscious designer. Look at language for example. We have a a complex system of sounds for communication, there fore it must have been designed by someone? False! To whom do we give credit for designing the English language? no one. it simply developed out of a need and continue to evolve through use, and mostly by shear accident, with both flaws, ambiguities, and contradictions, as well as beauty and poetry.

[Shuggy]

first of all, if it can't be tested scientifically, it can't be taught as science. plain and simple. you want to teach it in philosophy, fine. give it a try.

Or to be more exact, if it can't be shown to be false... The problem with creationism is that it explains not only how things are, but any other way, conceivable or even inconceivable, they might be: "That's how Go^h^h the Creator wanted it." Its problem is that it explains too much.

that still doesn't excuse the fact that the philosophy is based on faulty logic. one of the best answers I heard for "intelligent design" is that, just because something's been designed, doesn't mean there's a conscious designer. Look at language for example. We have a a complex system of sounds for communication, there fore it must have been designed by someone? False! To whom do we give credit for designing the English language? no one. it simply developed out of a need and continue to evolve through use, and mostly by shear accident, with both flaws, ambiguities, and contradictions, as well as beauty and poetry.

Yes, language evolved, and has all the imperfections of anything that evolved. For example "the querty effect". Like a typewriter keyboard, once everyone is used to it, no matter how bad it may be, it's very hard to change, because you have to change the thing and its users at the same time. That's why spelling reform (like Webster's plow, boro etc in the US) is so fitful and imperfect (how do you spell "timbre"?) and why Shaw's [beneficiaries'] alphabet reform, elegant, compact and functional as it is, never caught on.

But Creationists will just say "but intelligence was at work in creating language, just distributed, not individual".

For that reason, I think my way, of showing some very clear, simple ways we could have been better designed, undermines the IDers more easily.