Aron Ra asked me to address a novel proof for the existence of god. You see, the only way you can get a nose in the middle of your face every time, or any kind of symmetry, is if a designer made it so. If you leave it to biology, you’ll get noses in random places on your body!
He really didn’t need a developmental biologist to explain this — the problem isn’t that the old goober in the picture doesn’t understand the developmental cascade that leads to a predictable morphology, it’s that he has a gross misconception that physics and chemistry and biology lack any process that can produce predictable outcomes absent a god skewing the results.
By the way, I was doing my best to keep it simple. I know that asymmetries are common. I can see, for instance, that my right forefinger is slightly longer than my left by about a millimeter; I know that my left ear is noticeably higher than my right (I had my peers loudly pointing that out in grade school.) Are those facts evidence that a god must not exist, or at least, that the god we have is terribly sloppy?
I’m confused. Is symmetry supposed to an argument for God, or is asymmetry? Or does just anything count as argument, even if it contradicts each other?
Yes.
That last sentence in your post hits the spot, and it’s a point that this kind of debater usually prefers to ignore.
It hardly takes a genius to see how defective and prone to accident/injury/collapse our anatomies are (especially as we get older, cough). The conclusion? The creator must be a sloppy, ham-handed amateur, or a sadist.
Not very “intelligent” this design, unless one is ready to promote the Church of the Sloppy Cack-handed God, or the Cult of the Gurning Sadistic Bastard Deity.
Both congruent with observed reality, but not exactly notable for bringing solace to the faithful, what?
I wish to register a complaint against my Creator God, in that the incompetent old fogey made one of my balls hang lower than the other and utterly failed to provide me with a spare liver.
I was born with a cleft lip. One of the remaining side effects even after all of the surgery is that my nose is asymmetrical, and very noticeably so. It is also identifiable: the left side is my mom’s nose shape, and the larger right side is my dad’s.
My kid wound up nominal (and mostly my wife’s nose shape), so there’s that – seems both of my halves were recessive compared to that.
rietplum–
Creationists before Pasteur and Tyndall: spontaneous generation proves the existence of God.
Creationists after Pasteur and Tyndall: absence of spontaneous generation proves the existence of God.
It is the same old creationist concoction in a new wrapper. We are the way we are because god made it so. Symmetrical, asymmetrical, diseases, cancer, tragedy and everything that is or happens is all because god deems them necessary for his plan. It is all mysterious and we wouldn’t understand.
Flatfish are the devil’s work.
This is just the usual Argument from Ignorance and Incredulity.
They can’t understand something so the gods exist.
What it really means is that…they can’t understand something and this proves nothing except that they don’t know what logical fallacies are either.
Growing a woman from a rib sounds like a terrible way to achieve symmetry.
Also, I guess God intervenes every time a perfectly spherical water droplet is formed, huh? Otherwise it would be all blobby and misshapen.
I don’t think it’s really novel. It’s essentially what Bill O’Reilly meant when he infamously said “Tide goes in. Tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that!”.
Nemo@11 Magnets, how the fuck do they work? (I actually like the song Miracles. Just because things are explicable by science doesn’t make them any less amazing.)
Sorry… being too noisy on this thread, but I would add that the hard question is usually how does symmetry gets broken. In a purely deterministic system like a cellular automaton, it doesn’t get broken. Of course, that’s not our universe. An embryo starts out looking a lot more symmetrical than it eventually winds up, though clearly there is a lot of internal asymmetry that directs its later differentiation. But if you were going to ask a naive question it would not be why don’t we have noses in random places, but why aren’t we just perfect spheres of 2^n cells?
Also, what does this have to do with evolution? Bilateral symmetry (roughly) emerges almost all the time in a repeatable developmental process. Does this guy think God intervenes at every step?
Creationists love JAQing off and using false dichotomies involving God (e.g. “It can’t be random, therefore God”) because it’s so much easier than doing the hard work of learning the science. Making God (or the devil) the answer to everything is an easy and frequently used cheat in our society. It’s a lame way of excusing intellectual laziness. It’s also virtue signalling, but that’s another topic.
That would at least have the benefit of being consistent with the evidence! But I still like Kurt Vonnegut’s Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
I don’t mean to be insulting, PZ, but that guy looks a bit like you! In fact, my first thought was “Hey, PZ’s aged rather badly!”
Yeah, me in 10 years maybe.
More like 20 years. 15 if the MAGAT infestation drives you to drink.
How does he explain the layout of the internal organs? How does he explain the plaice?
why isn’t our nose on the top of our head like cetaceans?
What does (right/left) handedness prove, then?
Pierce, that we’re likely in a reality with only three physical dimensions, so that there can be but two mirror images.
(Concept at hand is chirality)
[no gripping hand — which, BTW, is explained as deliberate genetic engineering]
PaulBC@13–
It’s been a long time since I did any embryology, but AFAIK the development of embryo asymmetry is driven mostly by osmotic gradients reinforced by cell signalling. Having said that, there are still huge knowledge gaps in embryology, and I’m not sure we can rule out the cellular location of the polar body having an influence on asymmetry differentiation.
[also, asymmetry and chirality are entirely different things]
Not to mention, what urban planner in their right mind puts a town’s main playground and garden spot right next door to its sewage treatment plant? I mean, really.
Have you read the Old Testament? It pretty much is the Cult of the Gurning Sadistic Bastard Deity. Though they toned that down a lot for the sequel, where he mostly outsources the frankly sadistic shit to Satan.
Greek paganism was even worse, to the point of inspiring the phrase “like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.”
Apparently it’s normal for the testes to hang at slightly different heights so they won’t keep banging into each other while you walk.
So, now you made me look at my hands (have you ever just really looked at your hands?) and I realized that my strong hand is slightly smaller than my weaker hand.
And since no one else has made the joke…
“Why do they call them ‘fingers’? I’ve never seen them ‘fing’!
Oh, wait. There they go…”
h/t
Otto Mann
Also, JM @25, for as little as I know about the subject at hand, I completely agree. Chirality and asymmetry are way different things.
@26 My ma always said it only takes one ball. (She played a lot of pinball).
And @ Morales, thanks for the “Gripping Hand” references. Those are some books I need to read again.
chrislawson@24 Yup, it’s a fascinating subject and I will shut up in deference to our host, before I say something really stupid.
Pfft.
MY feet smell and my nose runs.
EXPLAIN THAT, GOD-BOY!
@26, B.Bound: that’s correct, but I find the ancient Greek attitude more palatable. They had no illusions about human nature, and that included the gods, pictured as physically perfect but flawed six ways to Sunday morally. This at least made sense, and produced some powerful literature.
What I cannot fathom is anyone bowing before a god who can only be described as grossly incompetent, Trump-level mean and hypochritical to boot. As you say, later they tried to picture satan as the sub-contractor for atrocities – but hey ho, he was also created by the boss, who is fully cognizant of (and complicit in) his subordinates’ doings.
The cognitive dissonance inherent in all of this really does my head in… but what do I know, I am no theologian.
outis–
Not entirely true. Even Greek gods could be flawed or misshapen. Hera was so horrified by Hephaestus’s club foot that she cast him out of Olympus. (There are lots of variants on this myth, but Hephaestus has a deformed leg in all of them.)
[cartomancer probably knows the scholarly consensus on that]