possible God's possible purpose and nature:human complaints (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Wednesday, June 02, 2021, 13:25 (1268 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another human author complains:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/evolution-gone-wrong-review-our-fallible-bodies-1162249398...

QUOTE: "In Alex Bezzerides’s entertaining “Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don’t),” the author’s quest is to determine the origins of the “aches and pains of the masses and why they happen”—not the mechanical causes of our maladies but the evolutionary ones. The explanation, Mr. Bezzerides concludes, may be found in our anatomical shortcomings—“trade-offs” made during our continuing evolutionary history. The result is that even healthy bodies operate at the edge of acceptable performance, while also being prone to fail in predictable ways.

QUOTE: Other maladies may be traced back to the origin of bipedalism. We weren’t designed to be erect, and becoming so has caused no end of problems for us, from back pain and torn menisci to sprained ankles. An ostrich has eight bones in its foot, whereas we have 26. A rational designer would never have included such gratuitous largesse. We are constrained and confined by our “evolutionary baggage”.

DAVID: He finds the tradeoffs as mistakes while I see them as brilliant designs which result in creating speaking thinking humans.

A convincing account of how our evolutionary advances also created problems for our anatomy. It’s a shame that you have included the article under the heading of “A possible God’s possible purpose and nature” – but perhaps you did so in order to distract us from the problem of theodicy. It’s also a shame that the author talks disparagingly of a “rational designer”. You both seem to be obsessed by the idea that the only possible form of God is an all-powerful being who always knows exactly what he wants and how to create it to perfection. You believe it, he doesn’t, and neither of you is prepared to think out of that particular box. I have done my best in the other two posts to offer rational alternatives to this vision of God (if he exists) that fit in logically with life’s history. In particular, the theory of the intelligent cell allows both for theistic and atheistic interpretation, as well as offering a possible solution to some of the difficult theistic questions arising from the theory of evolution itself, including theodicy and these examples of so-called bad design.