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Suboptimal design (EvoWiki)

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

Response Article

This article (Suboptimal design (EvoWiki)) is a response to an evolutionary or anticreation assertion that was published on the EvoWiki website.

In many organisms examples of suboptimal design or jury-rigged design can be seen. These features can be explained easily by evolution, the "blind watchmaker", which can only act on what it's given to act upon, but not by creationism, or intelligent design (except by the Theory of "God created it that way to test our faith") which states that a designer God created all organisms with a clean slate. Suboptimal design is generally not discussed in evolution, but there is some examination of the nature of evolutionary constraints. Public defenders of evolutionary theory like to keep it prominent anyway, as an answer to intelligent design's organized complexity and irreducible complexity. It is significant to observe that a single example of a suboptimal or otherwise imperfect design instantaneously falsifies the idea that a master designer has created by its intervention all life specifically tailored to fit its particular niche. The Fall has to be offered as an explanation if ID is to be internally coherent for evidence suggesting an error in the design of life by an allegedly flawless architect.

There is nothing within creationism that states mutations or mechanisms that effect phenotype change in an organism through environmental influences cannot produce suboptimal design. The very nature of creationism relies on a fallen world submissive to sin which degrades overall original optimal design.

It should not be surprising that life might show suboptimal design because of mutations. We should not forget that this results in loss of genetic information, so you would have DNA which becomes distorted, blurred, disorganized. It wouldn't necessarily reflect the original creation but it would be enough to understand diversification of that specie. It is however very suprising that EvoWiki intends to falsify what the modern scientific community considers essentially unfalsifiable or non-scientific, namely intelligent design and creationism.

1 Logical Fallacies
2 References
3 See Also

Logical Fallacies

The top three logical fallacies in the above text include:

Straw man

E: "Creationism says that life must be optimal. Life is not optimal. Therefore creationism is "instantaneously falsified."

C: "Actually no; Creationism does not require that life be optimal. It requires that life show the result of a fallen world, which EvoWiki states is the case. Originally God created them good which would include optimal design, but sin entered into the world and changed that very nature. The nature of life is consistent with the claims of creationism.

Value-laden definition

E: "Creationism requires that life be optimal. Life is not optimal. Therefore creationism is "instantaneously falsified."

C: "Who are you to determine what is 'optimal' and what is 'not optimal?' Optimal for which environment? At which time? For which purpose? You assume these values without objective justification and without even stating them. Many believe the Creator built "suboptimal" design into the creation to provide for an equilibrium. For if all organisms were "optimal," none would die, so none would eat." You conclude that creationism is false on the basis of your own personal opinion about what the designer "should have done."

Double standard

E: "Creationism requires that life be optimal. Life is not optimal. This is evidence that there is no intelligence behind life."

C: "Actually no; scientists, as intelligent as some of them are, remain incapable of creating the simplest self-replicating cell from scratch. Yet some of them (less intelligent certainly), judge the immense and incomprehensible complexity of the human body as "suboptimal," and evidence that God is either incompetent or non-existent. If the designer of the human body is incompetent, I shudder to reflect on the incompetence of scientists who can't even create a simple cell from scratch. Yet despite the inability of scientists to create self-replicating cells, evolutionists insist that it happened by dumb luck. It seems, then, by your line of argument, that scientists working on abiogenesis are even dumber than dumb luck. Personally, I'll take the intelligence of the God that created my "suboptimal" body over the scientists who have created nothing anyday.

Thus, suboptimal design forces ID proponents to decide whether they want to be scientists and acknowledge that their argumentation does not work, or pseudoscientists who invent excuses, making their hypothesis unfalsifiable.

On the contrary, it provides the creationist community another opportunity to demonstrate the willing capacity of EvoWiki editors to continously commit logical fallacies.