Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Who has the best design?

Something I don't understand about Intelligent Design (ID). Presumably the same Designer perfected the designs of every plant and animal. So let's say a cougar kills a deer, even though the deer in question is young, healthy, and has a nice rack of sharp antlers. Can't we infer that the cougar had a better design than the deer? After all, if the deer had a perfect design, it would use its perfect senses to detect the cougar's approach, its perfect reflexes to go into a fighting stance, and its perfect weapons to defeat the cougar (and perhaps its perfect immune system to heal any scratches that occurred).

But this didn't happen. So does the Designer like cougars better than deer? Does the Designer just like the taste of venison, or like to watch the kill? Did the Designer accidentally or deliberately include flaws in the design of the deer? Or maybe, just maybe, the Designer created evolution and sat back to let it run its course on Earth?

2 comments:

  1. Why does it have to be so binary, when clearly sometimes the cougar wins that meal, and other times, the deer gets away (or even defensively wounds the cougar so badly it can no longer compete, and perishes)?

    ME seems predicated upon an equal number of assumptions as ID, let alone a tendency to measure current rates of activity and project backward through the timeline, as if no catastrophic events ever change the tilt of balance to the point where prior events are essentially lost, or their data so degraded as to make them unrecognisable.

    In the end, it comes down to two methods of trying to explain events/phenomena based on a (at the time) contemporary data-set. Since the fossil record has several contradictory features (inverted sedimentary strata being a chief example), it seems that general humility is the best position from which to explore the nature of existence in the visible cosmos.

    But, in matters regarding your field of speciality, I won't dispute you've likely 'got' more ammunition to fill a debate with than IDers with only a casual understanding of the samples.

    BTW, I really love Swordbearer, and thank you again, as well as for your work on the Druid class (one of my favourites).

    :)

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  2. Thanks for the nice RPG comments. I will have to go check out Urutsk now...

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