Argument From Poor Design - As An Argument Regarding God

As An Argument Regarding God

The argument from poor design is sometimes interpreted, by the argumenter or the listener, as an argument against the existence of God, or against characteristics commonly attributed to God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, or personality. In a weaker form, it is used as an argument for the incompetence of God. The existence of "poor design" (as well as the perceived prodigious "wastefulness" of the evolutionary process) would seem to imply a "poor" designer, or a "blind" designer, or no designer at all. In Gould's words, "If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids are not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged...."

A counter-argument that has been made against this application of the argument – and that can be used against the argument from poor design itself – points out that the argument from poor design assumes that efficiency and neatness are the only criteria upon which the quality of biological design must be judged. The counter-argument maintains that, in addition to (or instead of) being thought of as an engineer, God is perhaps better thought of as an artist (possessing the ultimate artistic license). Moreover, this application of the argument presupposes the accountability of God to the judgement of humanity, an idea most major religions consider to be an enormous conceit that is diametrically opposed to their doctrines. However, doctrinal distaste should not rule out the moral issue that a benign God would not include design flaws that lead to pain or unnecessary death, such as the appendix, coccyx, our crowded teeth or a proclivity for cancer or the birth of babies through the pelvis. See Problem of Evil. But insufficient human knowledge may make things that actually are useful seem useless. For instance, it was once thought that tonsils were useless, but in fact they have minor disease-preventing properties. Such evidence of poor design would certainly be expected at least to reduce the effectiveness of the argument from design.

The apparently sub-optimal design of organisms has also been used by theistic evolutionists to argue in favour of a god who uses natural selection as a mechanism of his creation. Arguers from poor design regard all these counter-arguments as a false dilemma (God designed it, or it's flawed), leading to the unfalsifiability of intelligent design – if it's good design, God did it. If it's bad design, it's a result of the Fall (Genesis 3:16 has God saying to Eve "I will increase your trouble in pregnancy").