Intelligent Design. Really?

Creationists who believe that their god (not anyone else’s god) created the universe and everything in it, have a burden of proof that they cannot meet. The very idea of a deity, that not only made everything but gets actively involved, is an extraordinary claim and, as Christopher Hitchens said,

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

The problem for creationists is that no evidence exists.

As a way of examining this, let’s take a look at what religious believers assert is god’s most sublime creation, indeed the very reason for creating everything in the first place. The human body.

Far from being intelligently designed, the best you could say, if you were to accept the premise of a designer, is that he, she or it was incompetent.

What follows is a list of problems with the human body with a brief explanation of each. The information is not mine; it is taken directly from the Nautilus web site.

1. An unsound spine

Our spines are a mess. “It’s a wonder we can even walk”, says Bruce Latimer, director of the Centre for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. When our ancestors walked on all fours, their spines arched, like a bow, to withstand the weight of the organs suspended below. But then we stood up. That threw the system out of whack by 90 degrees, and the spine was forced to become a column. Next, to allow for bipedalism, it curved forward at the lower back. And to keep the head in balance the upper spine curved in the opposite direction. This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, giving lower back pain to about 80 percent of adults.

2. An inflexible knee

As Latimer says, “You take the most complex joint in the body and put it between two huge levers—the femur and the tibia—and you’re looking for trouble”. The upshot is your knee only rotates in two directions: forward and back. “That’s why every major sport, except maybe rugby, makes it illegal to clip, or hit an opponent’s knee from the side”.

3. A too-narrow pelvis

Childbirth hurts and, before modern surgery and medicine, it could be fatal. And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.

4. Exposed testicles

A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.

5. Crowded teeth

Humans typically have three molars on each side of the upper and lower jaws near the back of the mouth. When our brain drastically expanded in size, the jaw grew wider and shorter, leaving no room for the third, farthest back molars. These cusped grinders may have been useful before we learned to cook and process food, but now the ‘wisdom teeth’ mostly just get painfully impacted in the gums.

6. Meandering arteries

Blood flows into each of your arms and legs via one main artery, which enters the limb on the front side of the body, by the biceps or hip flexors. To supply blood to tissues at a limb’s back side, such as the triceps and hamstrings, the artery branches out, taking circuitous routes around bones and bundling itself with nerves. This roundabout plumbing can make for some rather annoying glitches. At the elbow, for instance, an artery branch meets up with the ulnar nerve, which animates your little finger, just under the skin. That’s why your arm goes numb when the lower tip of your upper arm bone, called the humerus or ‘funny bone’, takes a sharp blow.

7. A backward retina

“The photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye are like microphones facing backward”, explains Nathan Lents, an associate professor of molecular biology at the City University of New York. This design forces light to travel the length of each cell, as well as through blood and tissue, to reach the equivalent of a receiver on the cell’s backside. The setup may encourage the retina to detach from its supporting tissue—a leading cause of blindness. It also creates a blind spot where cell fibres, akin to microphone cables, converge at the optic nerve—making the brain refill the hole.

8. A misrouted nerve

The recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) plays a vital role in our ability to speak and swallow. It feeds instructions from the brain to the muscles of the voice box, or larynx, below the vocal cords. Theoretically, the trip should be a quick one, but during foetal development, the RLN gets entwined in a tiny lump of tissue in the neck, which descends to become blood vessels near the heart. That drop causes the nerve to loop around the aorta before traveling back up the larynx. Having this nerve in your chest makes it vulnerable during surgery—or a fist fight.

9. A misplaced voice box

The trachea (windpipe) and oesophagus (food pipe) open into the same space, the pharynx, which extends from the nose and mouth to the larynx (voice box). To keep food out of the trachea, a leaf-shaped flap called the epiglottis reflexively covers the opening to the larynx whenever you swallow. But sometimes, the epiglottis isn’t fast enough. If you’re talking and laughing while eating, food may slip down and get lodged in your airway, causing you to choke.

10. A klugey brain

“The human brain evolved in stages. As new additions were being built, older parts had to remain online to keep us up and running”, explains psychologist Gary Marcus in his book Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Mind.2 And that live-in construction project led to slapdash workarounds. It’s as if the brain were a dysfunctional workplace, where young employees (the forebrain) handled new-fangled technologies like language while the old guard (the midbrain and hindbrain) oversaw the institutional memory—and the fuse box in the basement. A few outcomes: depression, madness, unreliable memories, and confirmation bias.

All of the above flaws are explained by evolution. They occurred in non-human creatures and were retained when those creatures evolved. Evolutionary biologists have documented this process, both from other living animals and from the fossil record. The intelligent design lobby denies evolution, but how then are they to explain why their god made such obvious errors. Errors, it should be noted, that have easy answers. If designers make a car and then notice it behaves in ways they did not foresee, a wobble on acceleration perhaps or poor braking, they simply change the design. If we can do it, why couldn’t an all-powerful and omniscient god?

And just before I leave the subject, I would like, for a moment, to delve into the supposed intelligent design of the earth and the universe as a whole.

Religious believers would have us accept that not only did their particular god create everything, he did it with us in mind. Leaving aside the incredible solipsistic arrogance of that notion, it is interesting to ask a few simple questions.

Why, if such is the case, can humans only exist on a few limited areas of the earth? The majority of the earth is covered in water, in which we cannot survive without specialised man-made equipment. Even on land there are vast regions, such as deserts, active volcanoes and high mountains where humans cannot live without further man-made assistance. And that is on a planet made for us.

Why, if the universe was created to allow us to be placed on this planet, does it need to be such a terrible destructive environment? Why do millions of stars explode and die every day, taking with them all of their satellite planets and, possibly, destroying any life there may be?

Why does the universe need to be so unimaginably vast and why is it expanding in every direction?

Far from being designed, let alone with us in mind, the universe is chaotic, dangerous and violent. The vast majority of it is utterly inimical to life of any kind, at least as we understand it. We can and must draw two possible conclusions. That either god is incompetent and wasteful on a comic scale or that god did not create the universe or us.

PDC

May 2020