Unintelligent Design

God is supposed to be an all knowing, and all powerful being. He is supposedly our creator, and the creator of the universe. Furthermore, the universe is supposed to be our playground. According to the bible, the universe exists for us.

If these statements are all true, then God has some explaining to do. The human body is riddled with limitations that any competent engineer would spot. Also, the universe is FAR from a friendly place for the survival of the human race.

First, lets examine how imperfect, and how limited the human body is. Keep in mind, that we are supposed to be the creation of an all knowing and all powerful being.

As humans, most of us face the following problems:

1. The way that our DNA is made, we are susceptible to cancer thats caused by ultra violet rays from the sun. These rays mutate our DNA in our cells, causing them to go haywire, and replicate like crazy until it kills us.

2. For most of us, our wisdom teeth either grow in at an awkward angle, causing the rest of our teeth to become too crowded. For some of us with larger mouths, we have the room for these extra teeth, but flaps of skin grow over them, guaranteeing the onset of cavities.

3. Inheritable diseases. Some people don't have a choice in what diseases they are born with. Some diseased are presumed to be human caused, ie Autism caused by higher levels of Mercury. However, many diseases are inherited through our genes. An example of this is Alzheimer's disease. In Alzheimer's disease, broken proteins aggregate in certain parts in the brain, preventing the synapses in your brain to work properly.

4. Because we breath, talk, and eat through the same passage, a certain percentage of us is GUARANTEED to die of choking every year.

5. People claim that the human eye is a wonderful piece of engineering, and although it is very sophisticated, it is also very limited. We can only see a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. The entire electromagnetic spectrum reaches to near infinity in both the longer and shorter wavelengths that are beyond our range of vision. Anyone who has an appreciation of the entire electromagnetic spectrum can see just how limited our vision is.

6. A certain percentage of all new born babies will be born dead. Most of the causes of still-born babies is unknown, and is not man made. This implies that by design, God wanted a certain percentage of all fetuses to be naturally aborted.

7. Our head is proportionally huge for our bodies. As a result we have S-shaped spines so that way have better balance. This leads to lower back pain later in life, because so much strain is put on our lower backs to keep our head up.

In addition to all these problems with our bodies and brains (There are many more), this supposed Garden of Eden that we live in, is far from a favorable place for us to live.

1. If you look at the volume of the universe in which we CANT survive, it becomes obvious that this universe was not designed for our existence. If you don't quite know how small the earth really is, just think that the earth orbits our sun. And in the milky way galaxy, there are hundreds of billions of stars, just like our sun. And in our universe, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one containing hundreds of billions of stars. Thats billions, with a "B".

Even in our own small corner of the universe, the Earth is in a shooting gallery of things trying to kill us. The Earth gets hit by asteroids every 100 million years or so that will terminate all life on it, we have cosmic rays that give us cancer, and eventually the sun will engulf the Earth, guaranteeing that all life on Earth will end.

2. Even our own planet is out to kill us. Between natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis, that kill hundreds of thousands of people every decade (year?), and naturally occurring bacteria and viruses that replicate, feed, and eventually destroy our bodies, we have a lot going against us.

2/3 of the Earth is covered in water, places where we cannot live. Even on land, a sizable percentage of the Earth is uninhabitable desert, tundra, or ice lands.

All these ideas don't even include the amount of death caused by the notion of free-will that God was supposed to have given us.

I think Epicurus was on the right track when he said the following in 33AD:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God.


If after reading all this, you can look me in the eye, and say both of the following things to me: #1 That God is loving, and #2 God is competent, than I would love an explanation from you, because to me, thats absolute hogwash.

Sources:



Neil deGrasse Tyson giving a presentation at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference. You should watch this video, hes a funny guy and has far more charisma than I ever will. Oh, and he was the astrophysicist that was on the Colbert Report a couple weeks ago. So kids, hes a cool guy.