sparc
Posts: 2088
Joined: April 2007
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| Quote (CeilingCat @ Mar. 21 2011,23:29) | | Quote (olegt @ Mar. 21 2011,21:02) | MOAR hits from Torley. Here he is, arguing that God's creation is as buggy as Microsoft Vista:
| Quote | And that brings me to Pegasus, the winged horse. Is Pegasus possible? Certainly he’s picturable, as the image on the left at the beginning of this post clearly proves. But is he conceivable? Surely not. Just ask yourself a simple question: how does he fly? According to the laws of aerodynamics which obtain in our universe, this should be impossible. Picturability, then, is not a reliable guide to possibility. To argue that a better world is possible simply because we can picture it is to engage in childish thinking.
“Pegasus-thinking”, as I shall call it, is a besetting sin of Darwinists – by which I mean, advocates of an unguided evolutionary process whose principal mechanism is natural selection winnowing random variation. For instance, Professor Jerry Coyne argues in his book, Why Evolution is True (Viking Adult Press, 2009) that the male prostate gland is badly designed because the urethra runs through it, making men liable to enlargement and infection in later life. Aside from the fact that Coyne’s argument open to question on empirical grounds – creationist Jonathan Sarfati asserts that the risk of enlargement appears to be largely diet-related in his 2008 article, The Prostate Gland – is it ‘badly designed’? – Coyne is essentially arguing that because we can imagine a better design, therefore one is possible; and since we don’t find it in Nature, it follows that Nature is not the work of an Intelligent Creator. The question-begging underlying this argument should be readily apparent.
Professor Coyne also contends that the female reproductive tract would have been better designed if women gave birth through their abdomens. But this supposition is absurdly counterfactual: if humans did that, they wouldn’t be human. They would be some other kind of animal. In any case, Coyne’s argument overlooks the fact that for at least some human beings, at least, the size of the birth canal would not have been a problem, as the pelvis was considerably wider (see the BBC article, Human ancestors born big-brained, 14 November 2008). |
It's not a bug, it's a feature! |
Victor has a bit of a reading comprehension problem too. Coyne doesn't argue that running the urethra through the prostate gland makes "men liable to enlargement and infection in later life". He argues that when the almost inevitable prostate gland enlargement occurs in later life, the prostate gland clamps the urethra shut so you can't urinate and you die an agonizing death when your bladder ruptures if you don't get medical attention fast!
PhD Tard. |
The nice thing is that it is quite likely that VJ will experience this example of bad design himself. It's a safe bet though that he won't blame himself, his diet or his god for this but will rather claim that it is due to the that Eve made a mistake 6000 years ago.
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"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."
- William Dembski -
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