I surely would not. We're human. We're imperfect by definition.
But what about the intelligent designer?
If he’s the Christian God, then according to the Bible, he’s infallible. He shouldn’t make any mistakes. Whales shouldn’t have leg bones. Fruit flies shouldn’t have miniature wings that serve no purpose.
If he’s not the Christian God, then he doesn’t have to be perfect. He can make mistakes like the rest of us.
Another possibility is that the Designer deliberately made things imperfect in this world so that we can appreciate perfection in the next. After all, if all you ever know is perfection, you can’t appreciate it.
Interesting. But, can you reword this to be more neutral? I know that this is your belief and opinion, but I’m curious as to whether or not you can rephrase such that the paragraph is completely free of any references to religious tenets. After all, intelligent design is trying to market itself as a scientific theory. It should have no ties whatsoever to any religious belief.
Thanks.
I'm not an Engineer, but I think they would agree with the statement that perfection is the fulfillment of the designer's intent. The problem is, we don't know what that intent was, or is, so we have no standard with which to contradict. That's first and foremost.
Second, even if we did have knowledge of such a standard, science would need to be complete in it's knowledge of the given thing in order to make such a contradiction, and evolutionary theory, along with it's related sciences and disciplines, isn't even close to accomplishing such a thing.
Your argument may sound reasonable on the surface, but upon scrutiny, it actually demonstrates what you don't know, rather than what you do.....
If God designed us to be perfect, we would live forever and probably never annoy or anger each other. That would be heaven on earth. According to the Bible, things were supposed to be that way, but they got derailed by original sin. Whether you believe that or not, at least the Bible has an explanation for it.
But that’s all in the realm of theology and religion, not science. As far as science is concerned, imperfection in the design of life is certainly not an argument against intelligent design. As I noted before, man-made designs are imperfect too, but that certainly does not mean they were not designed by ostensibly intelligent engineers.
Please keep in mind what pure naturalists are claiming. They are claiming that no intelligence whatsoever was involved in the origin and evolution of life. Not “a little bit.” Not even one tiny bit. Zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Do you know what zero means? It doesn’t mean 10^(-1000). It means none whatsoever.
The thesis of ID is that some nonzero “amount” of intelligence was involved in the origin and evolution of life. And given the staggering complexity of the “simplest” living cell and our utter inability to even begin to explain its formation in purely naturalistic terms, I consider that a virtual certainty.
To my way of thinking, the anti-ID crowd is making a much more extreme claim than the ID crowd. After all, the IDers are merely claiming that the the amount of intelligent design behind life is nonzero, whereas the anti-IDers are claiming that it is precisely and exactly zero. If the “amount” is anything other than zero, then the IDers are right.