Intelligent Design Bad Arguments

Okay so I am a bit annoyed at the bad arguments surrounding Intelligent Design, both for and against it. This blog is inspired by Charles M. Madigan's article "God's Imperfect World".

From the article I want to discuss two flawed arguments.

First, people often make is that if God is perfect and all powerful then how can he create such an imperfect world.

Second, if evolution hasn't affected any of our creation why do we have useless body parts such as the appendix or what seems to be messed up body parts like our shoulders that seem better suited for creatures that walk on all fours.

Okay the first point is a common flaw with argumentation that either God doesn't exist or God is not perfect and all powerful. Not usually an argument that is used in the intellectual design debate. So why did God create those creepy crawling things that just annoy the heck out of everything that they ever come into contact with, e.g. look at pictures of things that live deep in the ocean. Or another example cited by Madigan is the preying mantis where the female dines on the male after copulation.

So Madigan seems to think that the set of living things on this world is a bad set since not every thing in the set seems to have a purpose or operate by some set of civilized rules. To complete the argument one needs to also include all those things that are not living that also seem strange and not necessary, like Death Valley or Antarctica or broccoli. Thus we come to the point that the set of things in this world are not really perfect but one can always show that they are imperfect through the right lenses. I contend this is an flawed way of looking at this set.

First problem is how to define perfection. One cannot contend that something is perfect or imperfect without giving some sort of qualifications for being perfect or imperfect. For example, if I said the world is imperfect because it contains things with cause pain to other living creatures, then I have defined perfection to be that which does not cause pain to living creatures. This is a bit of a silly definition because how many times do living things want pain, for example humans want the pain of being on fire so that our skin does not burn off leaving us for dead. So without a definition of perfection a perfect world does not exist period.

But what if we had an appropriate definition of the perfect, not that I believe we could ever find one. Then we could ask why is our world not that world, if in fact it isn't that perfect world already. Well to attack God's perfection one would first need to decide if the perfect world is even attainable. For example, if I have a set of numbers such that all the numbers are greater than 1 and also negative I would have an empty set of numbers. There are no candidates for that perfect set of numbers. Then if the perfection is attainable is it unique, otherwise how would we choose the true perfection. For example. what if I changed it to be a set of numbers such that all the numbers are greater than one and almost negative. Well here I can define almost negative in a number of ways, e.g. within 5 of being negative. What makes me choose 5 versus 6 or 10. In fact any number would suffice for my definition so what does picking one number over the other really matter when I am picking this new perfect set. Thus we have a case where there are an infinite number of perfect sets such that they are all good enough in that they still have that quality of perfection. There are for sure sets that are not perfect such as those actually containing negative numbers since all numbers in the set should be greater than 1. So before one can attack the imperfection of the world we must have a definition of perfection and a unique possible world that is a perfect world and not this world, or at least a characteristic of this world that excludes it from the set of possible perfect worlds. Otherwise, there is now way of claiming that this world is better or worse than any other world. In math terms, the set of possible worlds is not well ordered.

The second point is a gentler point that is flawed on both sides. First people who claim that God did not use evolution at all in the creation of the world we reside in are no longer arguing Intellectual Design but rather good old fashion Creationism. Second people who argue that science rules the roost and not accepting science's creation story all the way to the Big Bang or beyond is all the same as Creationism are also flawed in their inability to see the arguments clearly. So before one can argue that Intellectual Design is flawed because there is a design flaw in humans and other animals, the debate needs to include what has been evolved and what has been specifically designed.

This task of specifying what is actually design goes back to the question about perfection. Since Intellectual Design wants to hold that humans are the greatest creation, one must ask what makes them the greatest design. For example, I could have a computer program that has a very crappy human interface but be the greatest design for computations. Does this mean that the program is not the greatest design available? Furthermore the program will itself gain new programmers working on it and it will evolve with a better human interface but if it is the greatest design for computation then that part has nowhere to go and thus only other parts of the program evolves. Thus in the same way the Intellectual Design argument can hold that the design of the human is the greatest while allowing for other parts of the design to have evolved. At the heart of the matter I believe that is what Intellectual Design wants to do, to allow for evolution within the specific design of the human but for the human parts, what some will call a soul, to be that of divine creation.

Now whether Intellectual Design or Creationism or Evolutionary Theory is the right way to look at creation, I don't know. I go with the motto: "All models are wrong, but some models are useful." Who is right really doesn't matter too much to me, but getting the argument correct is just good manners.

I hope I have clearly explained why these are bad arguments, if not just comment and I will explain further.