Hacker News Reader

Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

I'm switching back to religion. I used to not believe but after the pandemic and researching the immune system, I don't believe that a complex system like simply the immune system can be not only created by chance but can be spread across an entire population. There are many components of the immune system and even the endocrine system that requires things to be designed together, not randomly across millions of years and I've decided that we were designed at some point because it's too perfectly intertwined across different body parts.

View on HN

If we were designed then it was a very sloppy designer. We can easily think of a myriad of ways it could have been done better. And quite mischievous to just leave all this evidence of evolution.

I think that the gnostics with the idea of a malevolent creator god would fit our world better.

To play devil's advocate, are we at a state where you can confidently say the design is sloppy? I feel it's akin to looking at an incomplete puzzle and judging it prematurely.

the shared opening to the esophagus and trachea in humans (and many other mammals). Hundreds of choking deaths occur in the US every year due to food obstructions in the trachea. Doesn't seem too intelligent to purposefully design such a hazard. Also the “incomplete” argument falls apart easily if the premise was a superior intelligence created it from the get go - if it was so, why would the “supreme intelligence” leave things incomplete as you say? Why not make them right from the beginning?

> Why not make them right from the beginning?

I don't intend to come off as obtuse here, but this was my original point. Our current understanding suggests this is a design flaw and is "wrong." However, there are plenty of cases where new discoveries have changed our understanding of a system.

So, I'm simply putting forward the question: At what point can we confidently say something is poorly designed? I'm not disagreeing that, based on our current understanding, some systems in the human body seem suboptimal.

Now, we can say it now. You have GP examples and someone more skilled wrote have avoided so many other issues.

The counter argument to that is that we do not understand why this is so (together with suffering etc.) which is the end of any discussion.

Ah, the unbeatable “the lord acts in mysterious ways, not meant for mere mortals to understand” argument.

I came to this realization long before I embraced religion. It seems pretty fundamental to the way we do science.

Vitamin C synthesis is a clear example. Humans do most of the work then fail at the last step:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Evolution_of_animal_...

When you look at the robustness of complex systems we design (i.e., IT systems) vs the robustness of the human body, I think it is at least fair to say it could be designed better.

This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

At Google (as an SRE), a large portion of my work was trying to understand problems that people have never even comprehended due to the sheer scale we operated at. Reading through code, I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident. I feel the same can be said for biology. Just because it doesn't immediately fit into our theoretical understanding doesn't mean it was designed poorly.

> I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident.

But the equivalent in biology is that we scratch our heads at some clearly suboptimal "design" choices, only to later find out that it evolved gradually from a much simpler system that solved a much simpler problem, sometimes even a different problem.

> This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

Might they not? I think measuring such things would be near impossible, but a human body does interact with a generally specific set of variables on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down when new variables are introduced - like when you travel to a new place and pick up a local bug that you have to get used to.

At least IT systems can generally disregard variables they don't recognize.

Wait. How many times has your vision frozen? Your brain crashed?

How many times has your hearing stuttered in and out?

How many hearts have you had changed out in your lifetime? Eyes? Ears?

Are you on your second or third tongue?

To say that IT systems are more robust than the biological systems is wild.

A healthy human lives on average for sixty plus years with almost every major system in the body being totally beyond repair by medicine.

There is almost no IT system in existence that has gone more than a few years without a crash or shutdown.

This is a bit funny to me, considering I'm quite visually impaired, with no medical treatment available :)

Many people lose their sight or hearing - or worse - regularly, often with no medical recourse. On the other hand, IT systems can be repaired and replaced as we encounter or anticipate certain failures

The fact that components of an IT system can just be swapped out when they break or wear out is not a disadvantage, but you seem to imply it is.

The Voyager computers have done pretty well (with some help from JPL).

Vibe creation?

It's unfortunate that your research led you to religion instead of learning more about evolution

It didn’t. Just typical religious lies about how various things are too complex to have been “random”. The use of the word random gives it away.

Be a little kind, won't you? It's always an occasion of sorrow to see someone turn his face from the world, and certainly I'm not prepared to assume myself immune to the same pitiable fate.

I'm sure being mercilessly mocked is a contributing factor to these statistics.

Never underestimate the shamefully desperate desire of those who grew up being stuffed into lockers to find whom they may themselves stuff into other, presumably smaller and more easily closing, lockers of their own.

This is such an incoherent response. Evolution and creationism are absolutely in sync. Do you think it’s somehow beyond the reach of an omnipotent/omniscient being to set up an evolutionary chain?

Many, many scientists start gravitating back towards religion. I’ll never understand the cocky approach with this topic.

Who are these many many scientists? Real science I mean.

For a physicist for instance, being in god is symptomatic of a mental disease, probably multiple personalities disorder -- because these two concepts cannot live together in one brain that believes both.

It is explicitly anti-science to pretend you have any true idea what is outside the universe, friend. We can guess at it of course, but you’d have to be extremely early on in your education to think “the tool that explores the universe” is somehow incompatible with “something explicitly not inside the universe”.

I am indeed early in my education (I am an engineer and have a PhD in physics) but from what I know, science, roughly speaking says - "we know what we know". And what we know, we know it by thinking out some models and matching them with experimental data. If the model fits, it is good enough for now.

What we cannot model or measure yet - we do not know. Plain and simple. We do not try to push an agenda of a deity of some sort which did all of that and therefore the "explanation" is that god is great.

We admit that we do not know and, hopefully, we will know at some point but before then we do not put ourselves in the comfortable shade of someone sitting on a cloud in the sky who know it all (but does not want to share :))

Correct, the discussion of a creator rests purely within the philosophical realm. That’s my point. To make a decision absent any evidence, yet knowing it’s a realm that needs to be considered (the outside of our universe) is explicitly anti-scientific.

Again, it’s got nothing to do with a guy sitting on a cloud. Anything natural to the universe must comply with the laws of physics. Any “powerful dude” is only a god until a “more powerful dude” comes along, realistically speaking.

Somatic hypermutation is evidence of a loving God to you?

I don't see God or loving in his response. Maybe they believe in sadistic aliens from millions of big bangs ago?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com