Argument.
The argument from poor design (dysteleological argument) can be formulated as follows:
P1. If God created humans, they would be well-designed
P2. Humans are not well-designed
C. Therefore God did not create humans
Response.
The argument from poor design is usually offered as a counter to the argument from design, which claims that the complexity of living things is evidence for a designer.
To evaluate P2, we must first ask what humans are designed for. Judging something as “well” or “poorly” designed requires knowing the intended purpose. A car designed for smooth roads may be excellent for that purpose, yet terrible for driving through deep water. Whether it is “well-designed” depends entirely on the goal.
So what is the aim of human life? If the intended purpose were to provide a pain-free, easy, and consistently pleasant existence, then humans might indeed appear poorly designed. But Latter-day Saints would deny that this is the purpose. Instead, life includes opposition, difficulty, and vulnerability because such conditions allow for growth, moral development, and a relationship with God. Even outside theology, features once thought to be examples of poor design—such as the appendix—are often reinterpreted as having functions we did not originally understand.
There are also reasons to question P1. God works within natural laws rather than creating organisms ex nihilo. This implies constraints, trade-offs, and physical limitations. A design can be the best physically possible even if it is not the best logically imaginable. The argument from poor design would be stronger in a worldview where God creates living beings by sheer fiat without any constraints at all.
Blake Ostler comments:
The natural tendencies of matter once organized are based on eternal principles…these natural tendencies or organized matter exist independently of God’s creative fiat.1
In summary, the argument from poor design raises worthwhile questions, but its force diminishes when we consider (a) the true purpose of life, (b) our limited understanding of biological functions, and (c) the Latter-day Saint view that God works within natural laws rather than creating life out of nothing. Under such assumptions, the conclusion does not follow as strongly as the argument suggests.
Notes.
- Blake Ostler and David Paulsen. Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil. ↩︎