What are the unintelligent parts and what are your alternatives? Also, just because something is not designed the way you personally would prefer it to be designed does not mean the design lacks intelligence. It seems to be a rather arrogant point of view; if it's not designed the way I think it should be then it's not intelligent..
Which is why I put it at the level "Things that could be better thought-out **even by a human level of intelligence.**"
Not the subtle or arguable stuff. Obvious.
The human eye's my professional speciality, and that has blatant design flaws, and far better eyes (sharper vision, healthier construction) can be found in the animal kingdom.
Impacted wisdom teeth?
One of the most obvious, however is painful and dangerous labour and childbirth.
(The bible handles that as a deliberate infliction by God... Intelligent Cursing?)
There are probably ways that this forum could be better designed, but would you suggest what it is now is not based on intelligence as a result of that conclusion? To me it comes across as irrational, but I'm open to having misunderstood you.
That's fair, but does the forum of itself produce offspring subject to variation and natural selection?
If not, it's not sitting under the umbrella of evolutionary theory anyway.
The way forums and websites appear, evolve and go extinct is not utterly dissimilar, but it's not very useful as a comparison to life and reproduction and natural selection based evolution.
I like a Gary Larson cartoon, which shows a female Praying Mantis explaining "the facts of life" to her brood.
The caption: "of course, long before you mature, most of you will have been eaten".
The look on their poor faces.
Evolution is messy and uncaring. The casualty rate is irrelevant as long as those better equipped to survive and reproduce emerge.
Coming at this from totally the opposite side of some here, I however agree with them that Theistic Evolution is a horrid hybrid. It produces some bizarre ideas, in the detail, so as a convenient bridge between science and theology I'd hold that it works... if you don't look at it too much, or too closely.
Are we back to common-sense? I can cope with the idea of a chance major meteor strike causing a mass-extinction of species. To have that as a deity hurling a giant rock to initiate mass extinctions in an act of deliberate policy now that I find something more unmanageable.
I meet a lot of people who think judgment is a bad thing, but I don't see it that way. .
Given a deity, I have no particular issues with the idea of judgement, or without one with the idea of social justice and judgement, but I wasn't thinking along those lines at all.
I was employing "good" in the Genesis creation sense of "right, proper, perfect". (sorry I though I'd given enough context)
And now we look and and see, as Christianity itself admits, that things are not like that.
As an account of how reality is, the proffered doctrine of "the Fall" to cover the difference from a past utopia to humanity's current lot... no, not impossible, but a definite "fix" and an easy to maintain one given its flexibility and adaptability.
Convenient it is.
Except perhaps the cursing of females.
(Generational punishment came under condemnation and criminality in the Geneva conventions. Along with collective punishment. Humans can think of a better morality than that shown in the bible? "unto the third and fourth generation")
Believing that something comes from nothing is also convenient.
It is? I think it's weird, and something that only arises rather as Sherlock Holmes puts it "when everything else has been eliminated.
A variety of odd things in science have appeared and demanded consideration when more "sensible" answers simply would not fit the data, the observations and experiments. Such can be the unsettling moments of great progress, delivering a verdict of "the answers we've got aren't good enough." A need to look again, to look harder and to reconsider the nice, settled "well that's impossible".
On Christianity as tough and challenging, I fully agree with you. It's not handy and convenient unless it's trimmed down to something else, which has been observed, in times and places where it becomes largely just the framework for the social norm.
