GeoTheo

Here's why this explanation won't work:
It not only needs to account for problems in design (known as sub-optimal design or bad design) it needs to account for evolutionary successes like finely tuned predators and parasites. There is a type of liver fluke that starts out life in the gut of a snail and then travels to the mucous glands. The snail spits it out encased in a cyst of mucous. Ants, for some reason collect and eat these little balls. The ants in turn are infected. There within the ant, the parasite travels to the ants brain, and through some unknown process takes control of the ants behavior. It causes the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass and clamp it's jaws. It will stay in this position all day. It is then hopefully ingested by grazing sheep. The fluke then invades the sheeps liver and reaches it's final life cycle.
The fall must account for this type of thing as well as things found in Oolon's list of sub-optimal design. It also must account for such things as cheetas that appear to have evolved alongside their fast running prey. Why on earth would gazelles or cheetas need to run that fast if they ate grass? Did they reach this capability for speed the day after Adam ate the fruit along with the formerly vegetarian liver fluke?

Oolon Colluphid

Bravo Geo! Well said!

That could be viewed as a separate strand of argument though: that if you have god making good stuff, he must have made the nasties too, because they show the same sort of design intricacies that are otherwise claimed as his handiwork. It is more of an argument from natural evil than a contra-design argument per se.

But the two strands do connect, because of the way the argument generally runs.

An intelligent designer is posited to explain organised complexity, in contrast to evolution (usually as a variety of the Argument from Personal Incredulity).

As with any hypothesis, we then look for potential tests and refutations.

On the one hand, we have recurrent laryngeal nerves, foetal teeth in baleen whales and blind eyes in creatures that don’t need eyes at all. These are not intelligent designs; we have no a priori reason from the hypothesis to think an intelligent designer would produce such features. At that point the hypothesis is refuted.

(If it is then claimed that we cannot know the designer’s intentions, so we don’t know that the designs are ‘poor’ really, then we equally cannot tell if any ‘good’ designs are really good either: if the designer has reasons for apparently poor designs which we cannot know, we also cannot know that he did the best possible work on apparently good designs. The ‘not knowing the mind of the designer’ argument is self-defeating. Both ‘good’ and ‘poor’ just seem so to us, and so tell us nothing about the presence or otherwise of the designer. The only yardstick we can judge things by is the human expertise: could a human engineer do better, and / or are there any basic sensible design principles (eg using excess materials, unnecessarily complicated procedures) that are violated? The answer for apparent poor design is often ‘yes’.

The ad hoc defence is ‘The Fall’. (It is ad hoc because the simple positing of a designer says nothing about other bits of theology such as Man sinning. All we were doing originally was looking for signs of design, not trying to support the rest of the bible.)

Which is where the other half comes in.

We also have the superfluous ‘design’ intricacies of many of these features. The Fall, Satan, or whatever, is implicitly credited with creationary abilities too. Bird genes for making teeth they do not have, and both-sex parts in single-sex flowers, for instance, are complexities, but not things the omniscient original designer would have done. (And by bringing in some sort of degeneration, it casts doubt on the designer’s motives or abilities, which is why it is reasonable to raise the ‘designs’ of the nasty stuff, like pentastome mouthparts, liver flukes and speedy cheetahs.)

Similarly, the Fall somehow created the scrotum. Testes have to pass out of the abdomen down a canal to it, leaving a weakess in the abdominal wall which commonly herniates. Such hernias can strangle the bowel and cut off the blood supply to the testicle. If this poor design is the result of the Fall, then where did the scrotum come from? The original designer could -- presumably did -- simply have had sperm make-able at mammalian body temperature (after all, our other gametes, egg cells, manage just fine). So whence the scrotum, with its host of‘good’ design features too: capillaries, veins, muscles to pull up the testes for (some) protection, and so on...?

It is an odd sort of degeneration that can produce complexities -- complexities that, were it not for some oddity that casts doubt on its design quality, would otherwise be ascribed to the designer.

Perhaps satan did some creating too, in a mix ‘n’ match battle with god:

“I’ll make sperm not possible at body temperature!”
“Then I’ll move them outside in a neat little bag!”
“Okay, well I’ll make the canal they go down liable to herniation.”
“And I’ll have it close up so it doesn’t... erm... usually at least... okay Lucifer, call it a draw?”



Basically, the Fall fails completely to explain much of what it is posited to explain. Since it was ad hoc in the first place, we justifiably say ‘bollocks’ to it.

Cheers, Oolon