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The argument from poor design, also known as the dysteleological argument, is an argument against the assumption of the existence of a creator God, based on the reasoning that any omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity or deities would not create organisms with the perceived suboptimal designs that occur in nature.
The argument is structured as a basic modus ponens: if "creation" contains many defects, then design appears an implausible theory for the origin of earthly existence. Proponents most commonly use the argument in a weaker way, however: not with the aim of disproving the existence of God, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design (which suggests that living things appear too well-designed to have originated by chance, and so an intelligent God or gods must have deliberately created them).
Although the phrase "argument from poor design" has seen little use, this type of argument has been advanced many times using words and phrases such as "poor design", "suboptimal design", "unintelligent design" or "dysteleology/dysteleological". The nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel applied the term "dysteleology" to the implications of organs so rudimentary as to be useless to the life of an organism.[1] In his 1868 book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation), Haeckel devoted most of a chapter to the argument, ending with the proposition (perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek) of "a theory of the unsuitability of parts in organisms, as a counter-hypothesis to the old popular doctrine of the suitability of parts".[1] In 2005, Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts Amherst popularised the term "incompetent design" (a play on "intelligent design"), to describe aspects of nature seen as flawed in design.[2]
Traditional Christian theological responses generally posit that God constructed a perfect universe but that humanity's misuse of its free will to rebel against God has resulted in the corruption of divine good design.[3][4][5]
- ^ a b Haeckel, Ernst (1892). The History of Creation. Appleton, New York: D. Appleton. p. 331.
- ^ Wise, Donald (2005-07-22). ""Intelligent" Design versus Evolution". Science. 309 (5734). AAAS: 556–557. doi:10.1126/science.309.5734.556c. PMID 16040688. S2CID 5241402.
- ^ Harry Hahne, The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8, Volume 34
- ^ Gregory A. Boyd, God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict
- ^ ed. Charles Taliaferro, Chad Meister, The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology, pages 160-161 - "Fundamental to the position is Augustine's view that the universe God created is good; everything in the universe is good and has good purpose [...]. [...] How did evil arise? It came about, he maintains, through free will. [...] some of God's free creatures turned their will from God, the supreme Good, to lesser goods. [...] It happened first with the angels and then [...] with humans. This is how moral evil entered the universe and this moral fall, or sin, also brought with it tragic cosmic consequences, for it ushered in natural evil as well."