The Argument from Lack-of-Design

I'm not an advocate of intelligent design. If God decided to make His design look incomprehensible to us, He could do it if He wanted. Just because anybody thinks something is designed doesn't mean it is.

However, I am opposed to what I call the argument from lack-of-design. To counter the idea that the appearance of design implies a designer (clearly, it can't), some people say that enough things are so badly designed that their ostensible designer can't have been very intelligent. Cue examples such as weird DNA sequences, knee joints, the apparatus of the human eye.

Actually, this is a very amusing argument. Let's see why this is so.

To begin with, let's define design as a process in which a situation of lower statistical entropy is planned and executed. By this we mean that the number of possible routes to reach a specific configuration of particles is deliberately decreased by the application of intelligence to action. Ideally, if there is only one possible route and there are many particles, then entropy is minimised for that set of particles.

This assumes a few things, mostly non-provable: an intelligence that can design, a will that can execute a design, a perceptive apparatus that can rate design as 'more intelligent' or 'less intelligent' and the power to execute a design without contravening its own logical underpinnings.

But the logical continuation is fascinating. Suppose we had a perfect intelligence (however defined) and it created a zero-entropy universe (by definition, a perfect design). Then what would it be like? The answer, I suppose, in the context of what we seem to know, is that it would immediately begin to fall apart into a random state of higher entropy. It would unwind, with patches of relatively higher and lower entropy randomly distributed.

It would produce situations in which any subordinate intelligence would have the potential for suffering, since such intelligences would be subject to local differences in entropy and probably able to recognize if they were 'better off' or 'worse off'. Those that were 'worse off' by any criterion would be 'suffering' from an objective point of view, and also 'suffering' from a subjective point of view if there were what we would call a time-based emotional component.

The inescapable conclusion is that the perfect design would necessarily create an imperfect universe in which suffering was one of many logical outcomes. What a bummer, you'd think, except that the fact of existence is a pretty good trade-off for some people.

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Random Notes:

Wait a minute, some Lack-of-Design enthusiasts might say. Isn't there evidence that the human eye is evolved to be better than, say, a mere photosensitive patch? Actually, no. It's more vulnerable to injury. But it's not worse. It can't see into far UV or receive radio waves for decoding. But it's not worse. It's not anything except what you want it for (or what you already have). If it could do better than it does, it wouldn't necessarily be a human eye. But humans are greedy and want X-ray vision. You'd need something like metal nerves for that. Could God have made it better? Well, my question would be, "What ever for?"

Also, the human knee (for example) could be in many states, some better, some worse. There would be no perfect knee. There would only be subjectively better knees and subjectively worse knees. For every 'better knee', some criterion could be located for which it would be a 'worse knee'. A zero-entropy knee would not be a knee at all. Think about it.