The Bad Design Argument

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Hi everyone,

Just a couple of quick points.

  1. Re God telling the earth to produce vegetation: the real problem here is one of under-determination. God cannot tell the Earth to simply produce vegetation, any more than He can tell dust to simply produce a human body. For the Earth (if it could speak) might respond: “Which vegetation, Lord, and how? Tell me the recipe, please!” Ditto for the dust. So if the Earth did produce life at God’s command, then it must have been a very specific one - in which case, one could argue the work was all God’s, and the Earth just supplied the raw material. One could not even argue that the Earth actively exercised its natural powers, as producing life is not one of the Earth’s natural powers, on this scenario: supposedly it requires a Divine command. At most, the Earth’s role could only have been passive.

  2. If on the other hand it turns out that abiogenesis is possible, then we would have to say that no Divine command was needed to get the process rolling. All that was needed were the appropriate laws and initial conditions.

  3. In his writings, Aquinas frequently cited the Aristotelian adage that God and Nature do nothing in vain. He evidently did not think that God could have made the first human beings in such a way that most of their DNA was junk. Nor did he accept the existence of vestigial organs. St, Augustine was of the same view on this point. I could supply quotes, but in any case, readers can look them up here. I’m not saying Augustine and Aquinas are right; what I am saying is that they would have countenanced the Bad Design argument, and many other Christians did as well. Why else do you think Darwin’s Origin of Species had such a devastating impact on people’s faith, at the time when it was published?

  4. There was an earlier thread on which we discussed whether the design of the genetic code was suboptimal. @swamidass’s response is here.

  5. Upon reflection, it seems that the ID movement has a point when they argue that the inference from an apparent bad design to no design is philosophically problematic. One also has to undercut the mathematical and scientific arguments put forward for a system’s having been designed, in order to show that a design inference is unwarranted.

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