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Comment by claar | Hacker News Reader

I once spoke with a Christian opthamologist who described how many times her professors had to remind their students that the eye was a feat of evolution, lest they reach the conclusion that this impossible engineering achievement was by the hand of God.

While this comment may draw unhelpful and undesired debate, I genuinely believe these amazing structures were created by the Word of the Almighty God and credit should be given where it is due. These are incredible designs by our omnipotent creator.

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Not sure what should be considered helpful or desired debate; such delicate a topic. Feel free to just say "stop" and I'll enquire no further. But since you're bringing this up, I'm tempted to ask:

If credit should be given where credit is due, should we also be allowed to criticize where the design is not amazing?

Certainly. But the criticism your likely to present is trivial to answer from a theological perspective.

It seems the point of theology is to make answering anything trivial. Whether those answers are useful or not is another matter.

I strongly disagree, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised if you dig in to some classical theology!

why do we need to wonder when things are well made if we're going to explain away anything that we don't judge favourably as "we poor mortals cannot grasp his greatness and thus cannot really that this is indeed an instance of bad design".

Why would we mere mortals be capable of knowing good design when we see it in the first place?

What's the customer support email/phone/address? I have some suggestions for new features.

That is, as they now say, beyond your pay grade.

Fedora tippers and fundies alike seem to vehemently agree on one really weird point - that God can not or will not create things through some kind of procedural generation. Both parts seem to think that evolution means that nobody could have deliberately and knowingly set up the initial conditions for it to happen. Which as far as I can tell doesn't follow from any of the data, whether religious or scientific.

Apart from that, all the evidence is actually on the side of the Christians, even though it's all anecdotal: scripture, patristic documents, traditions, etc. It's not quite enough to convince me, but the other side has exactly nothing, not even anecdotal evidence, on why there is something rather than nothing.

What's so great about the eye? It could easily be improved and many animals have better vision than us - more distance, ability to see polarization and UV, no hole in the middle our brains have to patch up, that saccading hack, etc.

The dynamic range is quite good though.

There was this notion that the human eye, in its astounding complexity, couldn't have evolved gradually, but had to have been created all at once, called "irreducible complexity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity#Eye

The saccade bug/feature is really neat. I remember reading a whitepaper a couple years back on how it was being leveraged for foveated rendering in next gen VR headsets. Cool stuff!

I am quite interested in the difference between people's intuition about things. The more complex a system is, the less I tend to think about it being designed.. It is just too beautiful to be a crafted artifact.

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