By way of tooting my own horn, I believe I said something similar, though not nearly as well, not too long ago. My logic was ridiculed at the time. Why is it, exactly, that so many are unable to consider any equation more complex than "Natural disaster = no God or bad God"? Or even "mysterious God"?

I suppose the other half of my argument was that most of the human cost of this "natural" disaster was actually avoidable, given a tsunami warning system like that operative in the Pacific and better infrastructure in the mostly poor societies ringing the Indian Ocean. The lack of either constitutes a man-made disaster, even if one can't point a finger at a well-defined set of individuals who might be held responsible.

M:

Why hold anyone responsible? It's a waste of money to put in an early warning system for something that happens so rarely.

Everything he wills is for our good. But like a framer we sometimes get our fingers stuck in the combine.

farmer

Ah yes, the panglossian sheen on science -- "... for since everything is made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose." - Voltaire

Is it asking too much of God to have equipped humans with the same instincts regarding impending earthquakes and tsunamis as He did animals?

Jeff: He did equip us with such sense, I believe. We lost it (and a lot of other things) as a consequense of The Fall.

Now let a Darwinist explain how the loss of such a sense (which presumably the lower primates retain) has an evolutionary advanatage for humans and humans alone.

Jeff:

A lurch into truth--Man is not Natural.

jd: the inference is, like almost every other French bloviation, unwaranted. The world was made for our good. But it involves the unleashing of energies and masses that are harmful if we get in the way.

This is as true of a garden variety thunderstorm as it is of a globe shattering tsunami. Yet we have thunderstorms on a daily basis and we need the rain. And even though thunderstorms are a daily event, and most of us know when to come in out of the rain, a few people are still killed by them every year.

God did not provide us with a padded room and he is not our nanny. We must make our own way in the world and protect our selves and each other.

I may be speaking from ignorance, but how can Prof. DePaolo offer that tectonics do not occur on other planets? Aren't the arguments for 'life' on Mars (partially) based on the similarity of geology, as viewed from space?

Robert: Apparently my obscure reference was misunderstood by you, for which I apologize. Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss was a shallow twit, which is why Voltaire was lampooning him. I was objecting to scientists concluding that all such events are for the best, based on what I regard as insufficient information.

While there is evidence of past tectonic activity on Mars, there is none for current activity. Like any heat source, it would appear that Mars' core has cooled to the point where it can no longer cause the necessary convection needed. I'm not sure about Venus, but the same cold core applies to all the other rocky bodies in the solar system. (Jupiter's moon Io might be an exception, except it also appears that tidal forces are what drives it's volcanic activity.)

Ted:

Perhaps mindless, goalless Evolution is a better answer.

After all, there is nothing prohibiting a designer both morally aware and Intelligent from making sure such a feature was part of the human software security package.

So perhaps the real truth is: not morally aware, or not Intelligent, or no design at all.

Yet we are morally aware, are intelligent, and there is Design and no way Evolution gets us there.

Jeff:

Whether our astonishingly big brains and their capacity for abstraction are the result of "mindless, goalless evolution" or a Designer will always be a matter of faith, no matter what your answer. As is the case with Cartesian scepticism of the senses ("is this real or am I dreaming") Occam's razor doesn't cut either way on this question, so you get to choose the story you want to believe.

Anon:

Fine, invoke Intelligent and Design.

'twould be nice to have something like consistent definitions for those terms.

The problem with trying to do that is correlating any such definition with observed results.

I'm interested in how you correlate Design with, say, ectopic pregnancies.

[I apologize for not signing my previous comment.]

Jeff:

First, from a macro view, the Designer's ways are not our ways, as the standard theological argument goes. On the human level of understanding though, the vast majority of ectopic pregnancies result from behaviors (tied tubes, PID resulting from multiple sexual partners) expressly forbidden by the Church. For the small number of ectopic pregnancies caused by genetic or other factors, I guess I'll accept the first answer.

Ted:

Why is your scripturally based explanation preferable to all the others?

Ectopic pregnancies are random. Maternal mortality, also random, was the cause of death for roughly 20% of women pre-modern medicine. Miscarriage, still birth and spontaneous abortions kill as many babies as humans do via elective abortion.

Perhaps we can talk also about cleft palate, or Trisomy-13, or ad infinitum.

Calling the Designer's ways not our ways is just so much theological hand-waving. If this is the best your Designer can do, then He isn't intelligent. If he is intelligent, then he is malevolent.

On the other hand, your Intelligent Designer might have established a system governed by random variation and recursion. Then walked away.

Occam's razor does cut here. Rather than wonder how to invoke Intelligence and Design, observe the meaningless, random suffering and conclude the simplest explanation is one relying on meaningless, random, happenstance.

There are many known recursive systems that work just like that--they produce goalless complexity.

All without relying on the attention of a deus ex machina.

Jeff:

You seem to get terribly hung up on this, as if anything designed by God would have to meet your personal definition of perfection. Maybe this is how a well-designed Creation has to work. (Note that you insist that recursion--which is a function of intelligent design--rules the world.) If you've not seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind you should.

OJ:

When the results are indistinguishable from happenstance, then willy-nilly invocations of Intelligence or Design seem singularly strained.

And answers like yours beside the point.

Jeff:

Yes, it looks just like how intelligent beings, like us, design things.

Well, I'd design it differently, but I don't claim to be especially intelligent.

For example, I'd ask Robert how we protect each other from the impact of a smallish comet?

If I cared about having humans worship me (and I'm pretty sure I couldn't have cared less, me being god and all and them just, well, humans) in the long terrm, I think I'd have designed all-intelligent-life-on-Earth destroying planetary impacts out.

Harry, you'd just be a bored "Q" then, and desire suicide over continued existance.

Harry:

What comet?

Comin' up, Orrin. Again.

Yet He makes them miss.

Jeff:

First, you are just wrong about ectopic pregnancies. Simply google on "causes ectopic pregnancy" if you doubt that the majority of them are the result of human behavior. The rate of them has increased 5-fold in the U.S. since 1970 and if you believe this is just a 35-year long statistical blip, well, then I guess there is no point in discussing with you whether random chance or design is likely to have caused a particular statistical result.

Second, you *could be right. But your position is no more based on pure reason than mine. The philosophical issues have been settled for quite some time now on that matter.