Free God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger Page A

evolution resulted in off-spring that require years to mature and grandparents with enough years remaining to help in their upbringing. Speaking as a grandfather, thank you, evolution!
    Let me list some of the flaws the
Scientific American
authors detect in the human machine that point away from any kind of near-perfection in design. Our bones lose minerals after age thirty, making them susceptible to fracture and osteoporosis. Our rib cage does not fully enclose and protect most internal organs.
    Our muscles atrophy. Our leg veins become enlarged and twisted, leading to varicose veins. Our joints wear out as their lubricants thin. Our retinas are prone to detachment. The male prostate enlarges, squeezing and obstructing urine flow.
    Olshansky, Carnes, and Butler show what a properly designed human would be like. She would have bigger ears, rewired eyes, a curved neck, a forward-tilting torso, shorter limbs and stature, extra padding around joints, extra muscles and fat, thicker spinal disks, a reversed knee joint, and more. But she would not be very pretty by our present standards.
    Despite their shortcomings, the various parts of the human body and those of other species do their jobs—even if those jobs were not part of any original plan. As discussed earlier, biologist Kenneth Miller argues persuasively that the eye serves us well and the inside-out nature of the vertebrate eye is nicely described by evolution.
    Nowhere Evident
    Richard Dawkins subtitled
The Blind Watchmaker
“Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design 49 .” However, not just biological data but, as we will see in future chapters, the whole realm of scientific observations lead to the same conclusion: the universe does not look designed.
    Estimates of the number of biological species on Earth range as high as one hundred million. Species on the order of ten or a hundred times this number once lived and have become extinct.
    Without getting into the current situation, where scientists and envi-ronmentalists fret that an increasing number of species may become extinct because of the degradation of the environment by humanity, these data can be best understood in terms of mindless natural selection. The large number of species results from the many, largely random attempts that evolution makes to produce a solution to the survival problem; many failures are to be expected as the bulk of these solutions fail. Many successes are marginal, leaving the species open to eventual extinction. We also now know that mass extinc-tions have occurred several times as the result of natural catastrophes, such as meteorite strikes or geologic disruptions.
    The other place where evidence for the absence of beneficent design can be found is in the short, brutal existences of most life-forms. A common misunderstanding holds that Darwin’s discovery of evolution led to his loss of faith. Actually, it wasn’t theoretical musings but his lifetime of careful observations of nature. On May 22, 1860, Darwin wrote to American botanist Asa Gray (d. 1888): “I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice 50 .”
    More recently, Dawkins has written, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference 51 .”
    Indeed, Earth and life look just as they can be expected to look if there is no designer God.
    Notes
    1 William Paley,
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature
(London: Halliwell, 1802).
    2 Keith