If You Say Bad Design You Are Still Saying Design
My good friend Jason Dulle responded to my previous post on ID with this:
Bad design does not mean “no design.” The Pinto may have been a bad design, but it was designed nonetheless. At best, bad design could tell us something about the abilities of a designer, but it doesn’t mean there is no designer. Furthermore, what we often call “bad design” really isn’t bad design at all. Whenever you design something, there are trade-offs. Think of cars. There are all sorts of things that can be better about cars: more speed, lighter in weight, roomier interior, etc. But there are constraints that require these things to be balanced. More speed would be nice, but it may require an engine so big that the car would be too large to navigate easily. It might be nice to have a lighter car, but if it is too light it could go airborne as the car picks up speed. A roomier interior would be nice, but the car still needs to fit in the garage. So we trade-off on the optimal this and the optimal that to produce something that fits a wide range of needs. There are two other problems with the bad design argument as put forth by Darwinists: (1) It admits design is empirically detectable (making ID a true scientific enterprise); (2) To say something is sub-optimally designed presumes to know the objectives and purpose of the designer to know how the design fell short of the objectives and purpose. How could they possibly know that?
Right. You can’t say design on the one hand, and NOT say design on the other. And while we’re on it, you can’t claim to have knowledge of the intentions of a designer that you are certain doesn’t exist, and oddly, be so certain about it.
