Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Potential Theistic Explanations 87
fl ap tagged with an instruction not to breathe while you eat, or the
organs of generation not just next to but partially carrying the organs
of excretion, or redundant bits of anatomy than can become infected
and kill their owners, or permanent vulnerability to large numbers of
invasive life-threatening organisms, or cells that constantly mutate in
potentially life-threatening ways, or the origin of the optic nerve slap
in the middle of the retina, or. . . . and so endlessly on. . . . Intelligent
design? Look in a mirror for the horse-laugh answer to that one. 27
As one might expect, the force of such suboptimality arguments is a much
discussed issue in the intelligent design literature. But the discussion is hampered
by a failure to think clearly about the structure of theistic explanations.
Proponents of suboptimality arguments write as though theistic explanations
were simple causal attributions, merely attributing some feature of the world
to God. Their suboptimality argument runs as follows.
(1) If God is responsible for this apparent design, we would expect it to
be perfect.
(2) It is not perfect.
(3) Therefore God is not responsible.
This implies that a theistic explanation merely attributes some fact to
divine action, and I have argued that an explanation of this form would
lack empirical content (3.2.3). And couched in this form, a suboptimality
argument is too easy to defeat, for it is far from clear what “perfection” in
this context might mean.
Even Gould’s “panda’s thumb” argument suffers from this weakness.
Gould argues that the design of the “thumb” could have been more effi cient
than it was. You would expect better of an omnipotent, omniscient, and
morally perfect creator. I have already argued that this is the correct kind
of question to ask. But it needs further specifi cation. For effi ciency must be
measured against some goal, and Gould never specifi es what that goal might
be. After all, the “thumb” in question is quite workable. So what does he
object to? That it is apparently cobbled together? Well, that might provide
evidence of its evolutionary history, but this is a different argument. It’s no
longer a suboptimality claim. And if the “thumb” is somehow imperfect,
is Gould implying that God should have created a perfect panda? But then
what would a perfect panda look like? As Paul Nelson writes,
given the conventional concept of the creator, there seem to be no limits
on what is possible, nor any reason (short perhaps of logical contradiction)
why one hypothetically possible panda should be preferred, as a
counterfactual ideal, to another. If “perfection” is limited only by the
extent of one’s imagination, then specifying an ideal phenotype, for
the panda or any other organism, quickly becomes a fanciful exercise.
Why couldn’t the creator have given pandas the ability to fl y? 28