One thing that I discovered during my medical degree was that the idea of the human body being intelligently designed was impossible to defend, as there are significant flaws from the gross anatomical [1-3] down to the genomic which make perfect sense when our evolutionary origins are acknowledged but which are impossible to defend from the point of view of an intelligent designer.
The genomic errors are of particular interest to me partly because the genomic era has conclusively declared that human-ape common ancestry [4] and evolution in general are facts beyond dispute, but also because they show how suboptimal design is burned into our very nature at the molecular level, a point evolutionary biologist John Avise made:
"Intelligent design (ID)-the latest incarnation of religious creationism-posits that complex biological features did not accrue gradually via natural evolutionary forces but, instead, were crafted ex nihilo by a cognitive agent. Yet, many complex biological traits are gratuitously complicated, function poorly, and debilitate their bearers. Furthermore, such dysfunctional traits abound not only in the phenotypes but inside the genomes of eukaryotic species. Here, I highlight several outlandish features of the human genome that defy notions of ID by a caring cognitive agent. These range from de novo mutational glitches that collectively kill or maim countless individuals (including embryos and fetuses) to pervasive architectural flaws (including pseudogenes, parasitic mobile elements, and needlessly baroque regulatory pathways) that are endogenous in every human genome. Gross imperfection at the molecular level presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces. In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID." [5]Avise is right. If the human genome was the result of an intelligent designer, then serious questions are raised (to put it mildly) about the competence and beneficience of that designer. Those problems are minimised by accepting evolution. It's a lesson that fundamentalist Christians desperately need to learn.
On another matter, I need to give a special shout-out to my number two fan Joseph Strong who accurately points out that I haven't "come up with anything fresh in well over a decade", though this of course fails to take into account the fact Christadelphian evolution denialists have't come up with a new idea at all. Given this, there's no point in repeating myself when my previous posts ably dissasemble the usual reheated Kent Hovind nonsense that passes for arguments among Christadelphian YEC activists. I would point out that the number of positive comments I've received in private over the years serves as a strong rebuttal to his concern that no one reads or cares about my posts.
References
1. Lents, Nathan. Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. United Kingdom: Orion, 2018.
2. Held, Jr, Lewis I.. Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body. United States: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
3. Hafer, Abby. The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not. United Kingdom: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015.
4. Finlay, Graeme. Human Evolution: Genes, Genealogies and Phylogenies. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
5. Avise JC. Colloquium paper: footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 May 11;107 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):8969-76. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914609107. Epub 2010 May 5. PMID: 20445101; PMCID: PMC3024021.
