Argument from poor design

The argument from poor design, also known as the dysteleological argument, is an argument against the assumption of the existence of a creator God, based on the reasoning that any omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity or deities would not create organisms with the perceived suboptimal designs that occur in nature.

The argument is structured as a basic modus ponens: if "creation" contains many defects, then design appears an implausible theory for the origin of earthly existence. Proponents most commonly use the argument in a weaker way, however: not with the aim of disproving the existence of God, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design (which suggests that living things appear too well-designed to have originated by chance, and so an intelligent God or gods must have deliberately created them).

Although the phrase "argument from poor design" has seen little use, this type of argument has been advanced many times using words and phrases such as "poor design", "suboptimal design", "unintelligent design" or "dysteleology/dysteleological". The nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel applied the term "dysteleology" to the implications of organs so rudimentary as to be useless to the life of an organism.^[1] In his 1868 book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation), Haeckel devoted most of a chapter to the argument, ending with the proposition (perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek) of "a theory of the unsuitability of parts in organisms, as a counter-hypothesis to the old popular doctrine of the suitability of parts".^[1] In 2005, Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts Amherst popularised the term "incompetent design" (a play on "intelligent design"), to describe aspects of nature seen as flawed in design.^[2]

Traditional Christian theological responses generally posit that God constructed a perfect universe but that humanity's misuse of its free will to rebel against God has resulted in the corruption of divine good design.^[3][4][5]