Unintelligent Design - Richard Carrier

Transcript from a Richard Carrier interview on Intelligent Design.

The human brain has to be really large to be able to perform this complex function called consciousness. It has to be so large, in fact, that it kills 1 out of 5 women who give birth without modern medicine to help them, so that's a really messy design. You wouldn't want to make something where babies kill their mothers 1 out of every 5 times, and there are many other problems as well. The brain is a HUGE hog. It sucks up all the oxygen and all the energy, so you're wasting a lot of your breathing and eating, and so forth, just to feed this brain, so it's very inefficient. It's also very vulnerable to injury, it's a very delicate organ. If it gets injured your whole cognitive function can be damaged. You can lose your sight, you can lose your reason, you could lose control of your emotions, it's a very vulnerable organ. It's not what a god would design. And, god wouldn't need to design it (stay with me here.)

If a god exists, then obviously a mind can exist without a body, because god is without a body. So, we could have minds without brains, we don't need brains. God could just give us a soul, like the Chrisitans actually think we have, and if we had a soul and it did all the actual consciousness, percieving, and thinking, we wouldn't need a brain. So, we wouldn't have to kill our mothers, we wouldn't have to have this organ that is sucking up all our energy, and making our bodies inefficiant, we wouldn't have this delicate organ that could easily be injured and ruin our cognative facalties, and so forth. There would be no need for that brain. But, if god does not exist - in fact, if it's impossible for a mind to exist without a fleshy organ to create it, then it necessarily follows that the only way to have a conscious being is to have this large, messy, vulnerable brain. So, isn't it surprising that on assumption that there is no such thing as a disembodied mind, it necessarily predicts that the only way there could be a mind is to have this complex brain. Lo and behold, we have this huge complex brain.

And yet, on the Christian theory we expect the exact opposite, we expect to have a soul, not brains. Well why do we need brains? We need brains if atheism is true. So, the existance of huge brains is positive proof that atheism if true, because the christian god would build something differently. Now, a Christian will respond to try to make up excuses for why god made the brain, but these excuses are just pulled out of thin air, and they don't really rescue the theory. It's still a fact that the only way atheism can be true, is if we have these large brains. We have these large brains - that's evidence for atheism. It might not be proof, it might not settle the issue, but it's evidence for it.

And, if god had some weird reason to do this, then it means that god had some weird reason to make the universe look exactly like it would have to look if god did not exist. And, that seems highly improbable.