The Bad Design Argument

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@vjtorley

I just had a look at the Spore video. It looks like an interesting game, but I’m afraid I’m one of these terrible people who never plays online games - I just can’t get into them. Seriously, though: are you making this claim only for Spore, or for all games?

Only for Spore. It came up because of @anon46279830, not me.

In general, it is usually a bad idea to try and understand evolution by making analogies to computer code, language, cars, human designs, computer games, etc. We fall prey to the Idol of the Theatre very quickly. Biology is “like” many things, but also very unlike all these things too.

@vjtorley

I don’t think this is true a priori , even if it happens to be true in our universe. Let me put it this way. Suppose, for argument’s sake, it turned out to be really true (as Dr. Douglas Axe has argued - mistakenly in my opinion) that proteins are (a) astronomically rare and (b) isolated from one another, making a “stepping-stones” scenario for the evolution of proteins massively implausible. Would that be a pretty good scientific argument for divine design? I’d say so. Not conclusive, perhaps, but highly suggestive.

Well sure. If the evidence was different, and science was different, perhaps we would have a different position.

However, with evidence as it is, and science as it is, it is not really possible to see divine design in science. We can debate how much it would be if science were different, but the way the evidence comes to us is problem too. This shouldn’t trouble us too much, because there is no a prior reason to think God’s design should be anything like human designs.