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Thursday, February 23, 2012

Why God is Not the Best Engineer of All Time


Human beings, our brain, our heart, the earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the stars, energy fields, living organisms, ... The list of the amazingly complex systems in this world is infinite, which makes you
think that if there is a God, he surely is the finest and best designer/engineer of all time. With all due respect, I disagree! I believe if God exists, he is in fact not the best engineer of all time! Here are my reasons:
  1. There is no User Manual for life! Yes, all engineers hate writing documents but they eventually do write them. No solid engineering firm ever does a “release” without release notes, data sheets, user manuals, etc. Then why is it that after so many years of evolution (which to me correspond to releases in this analogy) we have no clue why we are here, what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to use our bodies, minds, emotions, surroundings, etc.? I often wish there were a big book of life I could refer to, to figure what I need to do! And don't even mention the holy books that are supposed to lead us in our paths. Even if you are religious and you believe in them, you would agree that they are old. Using them is like using the first ever built calculator's user manual to operate the latest rocket ship going to Mars!
  2. There is no reset button on our bodies! Have you ever seen an electronic device that does not have a reset button? If God is this amazing engineer and creator of human beings, why is it that he never put a reset button on our brains? In fact we need to have both a soft and a hard reset like most electronic devices do. The soft reset would not reset our memories. It would just reset the brain when we are nervous wrecks, utterly confused and hung up, or totally burned out! The hard reset in turn would completely reformat our brains to their initial clean state before we gathered all the junk we gather as we grow up and gain “experience”.
  3. If we were designed by a good engineer, we would have had better diagnostics capabilities. For thousands of years we have been busting our behinds trying to discover what each of our symptoms mean. Sometimes they are incredibly confusing. You get a headache but it is really from your tooth. You have back pain but it is caused by your stomach. You have nausea but that is because you are pregnant! What? What kind of flag setting is that? If God were a greart engineer we would have had much better built-in diagnostics in our bodies, and would not have had to work so hard to invent X-rays, MRIs, CT Scans, etc.
  4. No customer support? Any good firm that delivers consumer products has a customer support team. Who can we can call when we are stuck? When we are sick? When we have lost our way and do not know what to do? OK maybe this one shows God is not a good businessman but you get the point!

There you have it. I can think of more problems such as “lack of spare parts” or “inconsistency in design” but I will stop here to keep this essay short.

I hope you did not take what I said too seriously as it was just written for amusement. Let me know if you can think of other reasons for or against this argument! ;-)

2 comments:

  1. In the spirit of good debate I will take a contradictory position... Let's assume that God is the creator and engineer of all things. Take the marvels of the human body, more durable and long lasting then any complex product man has engineered, can operate in every climate, it's durable, and incredibly energy efficient. If only we could power our cars or laptops with a little pasta and a bottle of Barolo! It is more complex then any engineering feat to date, simple proof is we have yet to understand how the human brain works despite working on the problem since the dawn of consciousness. It can reproduce itself cheaply, efficiently (and fun!) As for a users manual, release notes etc. Most people don't understand them, I don't use them for any products I have...an appeal to engineers everywhere spend more time creating a product that works so that manuals are unnecessary! Ok on to the reset button, we all have them but we just need to figure out how to press them. Vacation, art or that bottle of Borolo. On the diagnostics I will concede a little with just one comment, we often don't listen to what are bodies are telling us and much like "whack a mole" the issue pops back up somewhere else. Customer support for this product is more like the linux operating system, provided by the community of users. Love the original thought and humorous way you presented your "argument" I look forward to more!

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    1. LOL, thanks for the comments My Path! I will give you the energy efficiency argument, but I am afraid the rest don't fly! A hidden reset button? What is the point of that? Durability of 100 years compared to what people are deigning today? Not nearly enough. Linux community? You can't compare an open source operating system designed and maintained by a community with the universe that is designed by someone else and left to be discovered by human beings!
      Nice arguments though. Witty and thoughtful! Thanks!

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