Which isn't how this works, philosophically speaking.
The best argument for evolution isn't a listing of how badly-designed we are, it's a simple observation that the one simple principle of natural selection through modified descent suffices to explain us. We don't need any other hypothesis. Therefore, the principle of parsimony kicks in and other, more complicated, hypotheses are ruled out. Not absolutely, but fairly strongly, at least until we find things that our current hypothesis cannot explain, which hasn't happened yet.
Well, the GP was really just obliquely calling back to Occam's Razor. Evolution is a very simple process that explains biological complexity, compared to creationism, which requires a sentient creator to have invented the universe wholesale.
Of course, Occam's razor should be treated as a guide... it's no proof.
More of a counter to the intelligent design argument. Well, at least to the intelligent part. Proponents of intelligent design tend to be religious, and having difficulty accepting a fallible deity
This is how I use it in debates where intelligent design proponents will on top of the complexity argument tend to use examples of how fantastic everything is as evidence of design. A blatant example of something that seems so in your face obviously flawed tends to throw them.
It's also useful because the complexity of the eye is often used as an argument for ID on the assumption that an incomplete eye would be useless, but for the eye we do have a long range of intermediate stages that would provide useful levels of sight, and we can show a long range of variations over eyes in existing organisms.
If the universe and everything in it--including ourselves--was created by an intelligent creator being, then we would be in no place to judge whether such a being was fallible. The very concept of what constitutes an error would be defined by the being itself.
Your question is so loaded it is bursting at the seams.
What qualifies as "messed up?" Having a design that appears suboptimal?
What would be not-messed-up, or what would be perfect? Having vision equivalent to a hawk? A telescope?
Why do you assume a creator being would necessarily choose to make perfect things? What if creating perfect things was not the creator's purpose? What if its creation was perfect for its intended purpose?
If a supernatural being exists and created the universe and us, it's ludicrous to think that we could put ourselves in its place and say, "Well, obviously he should have done it like this instead, therefore he doesn't exist."
We can't even understand how our own brain works, but some of us think that we are smarter than God. Regardless of what you believe about the existence of a supernatural creator, it's obvious that we would be inferior to such a being.
> We can't even understand how our own brain works, but some of us think that we are smarter than God.
If you refuse us the right to make any claims about a god, you also refuse the right to make any arguments for it.
Obviously, ars was talking about the gods mentioned in popular religious texts. These texts make very specific claims about what their gods are and do.
Arguing about arbitrary gods is, of course, largely fruitless. However, belief in them is equally fruitless.
I actually really enjoy watching Dawkins' argument against intelligent design get shredded by basic modelling. Not that I believe in intelligent design, but because Dawkins is a smug bastard who wove an entire argument on a fallacious assumption.
Sure. It's pretty straightforward. Dawkins is making an argument against intelligent design. He does so by setting up an artificial argument:
1) The eye is "backwards"; light has to pass through the wiring
2) any engineer dislikes disarray; why would they design a photoreceptor where the light has to pass through the wiring
3) therefore, it's unlikely that eyes were "designed", for if they were, they would be much nicer and more tidy.
(see The Blind Watchmaker, "This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer)".
In short, Dawkins argument is weak- it appeals to design tidiness, not to any real facts or logic about how evolution works. But as this modelling (oh, and I see they did some experimental work as well) shows, it's just as likely that the mammalian eye configuration isn't as bad as he said.
The arguments against intelligent design should be based on reality. Dawkins is probably right about this sort of thing (that there is no ID), but he's typically right for the wrong reason (specious logic).
(Dawkins then further argues against parallel evolution, although we're now finding out it's also quite common. he's wrong about a lot of things).
I should further argue that finding the eye in this configuration "backwards" according to some, is really just applying human aesthetics about how things should be engineered, where biology is a combination of happenstance and optimization. I suspect, as we tease out the biophysics of the eye further, we will find many more examples of how Dawkins' simple logic (which isn't really logic, but more based on aesthetics and intuition) doesn't really explain things.
