I’m always on the alert for new books that will help me get into interesting conversations with people about the big questions of life. The trick is being good on every topic relevant to the big questions. I’ve had to learn the basics of cosmology, astrobiology, paleontology, historical methods, economics, policy, investing, etc. And there’s a new book out on the human body that might help me to have even more interesting conversations.

Here’s a description of the new book by physicist Dr. Brian Miller (who is actually our guest on the next episode on the Knight and Rose Show):

I have written previously about the groundbreaking research of engineering professor Stuart Burgess that has demonstrated the exquisite design behind human anatomy… Dr. Burgess has compiled many of the best examples in his new book, out today for Darwin Day, the birthday of Charles Darwin: Ultimate Engineering: How Human Biomechanics Reveals Intelligent Design. This book not only dismantles claims that the human body often appears poorly designed, but it also demonstrates that human anatomy displays ingenuity and efficiencies far superior to the best creations of human engineers.

I know what most of you are used to making sophisticated arguments like the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine-tuning, habitability, explosions of biological complexity in the fossil record, etc. But think back to when you were in high school. Your friends were deciding what to think about origins then, and they did not know about the sophisticated arguments. At that time, I remember my friends accepting Darwinian evolution over things like supposedly poor designs in biology as well as the “icons of evolution” that Dr. Jonathan Wells writes about. So, you and I have to know how to respond to that low level of argument for Darwinian evolution.

Anyway, Dr. Miller continues:

After contrasting the divergent expectations of the two frameworks, Burgess shows that claims of poor design consistently collapse under close inspection… Rather than arising from empirical evidence, evolutionary critiques largely reflect the projection of anti-teleological expectations onto the biology.

Burgess goes much further by demonstrating that human anatomical structures appear was well designed as theoretically possible.

He mentions a few “poor designs” in the article, and I hadn’t heard of any of them.

The argument against design from sub-optimal design is a fine argument to try, but I don’t think it is going to work on engineers. I am a software engineer. When we do designs, we are always thinking in terms of tradeoffs. I used to work in the embedded space, so we wanted to have things run fast, but we couldn’t put desktop CPUs and desktop amounts of memory in these little devices or they would cost too much! Designers understand that optimal design simply is not realistic. I buy my Dad a new laptop every 4 years, and sometimes his old one is still working fine. He keeps telling me that he wants his laptops to last more than 5 years, but if they did, he would have to accept that this might blow up the cost, the size, the power consumption, the noise level, etc. There’s no free lunch when you’re designing software or hardware.

And in the human body, the designs have clearly prioritized certain features at the expense of others. Just because God designs something, it doesn’t mean that it has to match our expectations of “perfect” design. We want to live forever, but that’s not what God wants most of all. He gives us a body that lasts a certain period of time so that we can either reconcile with him or not. People want to think that the design of biological systems should be for their comfort and ease. But that’s not what God’s goal is when he designs something. He has different goals.

I think some people who reject God just don’t want to accept that they are not the center of the universe. They say “well, if my happiness isn’t the goal of all this designing, then I’ll just deny that there is a designer”. I remember Christopher Hitchens saying things like that in his debate with William Lane Craig. “The universe is so big, I don’t like it. That’s not how I would have done it”. And there are certain people that find an argument like that very convincing for some reason. To me, it sounds too narcissistic. Why does everything have to be perfect for me, or I throw a temper tantrum? Sometimes I think that a theist is just someone who doesn’t insist on having their own way all the time, about every little thing.

I noticed that Dr. Miller has a new article up after this first one where he talks about two specific examples of design: the knee and the brain.

If this is something you think you might like to add to your quiver of discussion topics, check out the book.