The Candide Lemma (Steven Pinker on Design)

Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard University, and best-selling author and linguist.

""....Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree, goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design. What twisted sadist would have invented a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: If an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break His windows.

The theory of natural selection explains life as we find it, with all its quirks and tragedies. We can prove mathematically that it is capable of producing adaptive life forms and track it in computer simulations, lab experiments and real ecosystems. It doesn't pretend to solve one mystery (the origin of complex life) by slipping in another (the origin of a complex designer).

Many people who accept evolution still feel that a belief in God is necessary to give life meaning and to justify morality. But that is exactly backward. In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11. Morality comes from a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. Like physical evolution, it does not require a white-coated technician in the sky.""""

Pinker, unlike many of the neo-Darwinists (Dawkins hints at the issue, but does not really develop it) points out a central problem of any putative "Design arguments": a Designer would by definition have knowingly designed the bacteria that caused the black plague (--and all other nasty organisms, whether viruses, or T. Rex). However obvious that point is (it was obvious to Voltaire, the Marquis Of Arouet, and really to the more skeptical of the Founding Fathers such as Franklin and Jefferson (who kept a bust of Voltaire in his study)), it remains a rather powerful counterargument to theological "naturalism"--and really to any religious claims. For Voltaire, the Lisbon quake of his time (and the tidal wave which resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people) offered ample evidence of a lack of a perfect Designer--and the Indonesian tsunami of 12/2004 Lisbon x 30. Yet neither tsunamis nor plagues (nor world wars) phase the modern fundie: each sunday he marches into his chapel and gives thanks to his volcano "God".