Argument From Poor Design

The dysteleological argument or argument from poor design is an argument against the existence of God, specifically against the existence of a creator God (in the sense of a God that directly created all species of life). It is based on the following chain of reasoning:

1. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
2. Organisms have features that are sub-optimal.
3. Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

The argument is structured as a basic Modus tollens: if "creation" contains many defects, then design is not a plausible theory for the origin of our existence. It is most commonly used in a weaker way, however: not with the aim of disproving the existence of God, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design, which runs as follows:

1. Living things are too well-designed to have originated by chance.
2. Therefore, life must have been created by an intelligent creator.
3. This creator is God.

The complete phrase "argument from poor design" has rarely been used in the literature, but arguments of this type have appeared many times, sometimes referring to poor design, in other cases to suboptimal design, unintelligent design, or dysteleology; the last is a term applied by the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel to the implications of organs so rudimentary as to be useless to the life of an organism (, p. 331). Haeckel, in his book The History of Creation, devoted most of a chapter to the argument, and ended by proposing, perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, to set up "a theory of the unsuitability of parts in organisms, as a counter-hypothesis to the old popular doctrine of the suitability of parts" (, p. 331). The term incompetent design has been coined by Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts Amherst to describe aspects of nature that are currently flawed in design. The name stems from the acronym I.D. and is used to counterbalance arguments for intelligent design.