You're assuming that the designer values efficiency. Since a cosmic designer has literally all the time in the world ( and then some ) said designer has no reason to value efficiency. Assuming there is a designer ( read a god ), that designer may have valued the unfolding of the evolution story more than any specific product of evolution at any specific time.
KJ, I have no such regimen. You know that such a regimen is impossible and so you are placing an impossible standard on what you will accept as evidence. On the other hand, you are trivializing the most profound issue we can confront by demanding that it be reduced to mere science. Science is nothing more than a method for reaching an understanding of the physical world; although science is effective at describing the physical world and explaining how it got to be what it is from some point in the past it's incompetent to explain how the physical universe came to be.
Ask your christian friends how the basic christian tenet of free will jives with God meddling in the daily happenings in their lives.
I think most christians believe that God listens to and sometimes answers their prayers. A millionaire prays that his mercedes will be out of the garage by Wednesday, a starving child prays for bread; neither prayer is more likely than the other to be answered. The logic of this God is strange.
Pretty good, SB - except for the "spiritual supercomputer" bit; it's an oxymoron. If we're computers we're certainly not supercomputers; we're not even up to the standards of the earliest hand-held calculators. Your argument is sophisticated. Why do you waste your time responding to this jejune "God must be incompetent because the world is imperfect" bullshit? God as designer isn't God as engineer.
This is an amazing retreat. So all the designer wanted to do, when he designed the world, was to see how "the evolution story" unfold? Do you mean that the designer did NOT design eyes so that we can see, did NOT design legs so that we can run? Did he just simply design some primitive, single celled organism and wanted to see how eyes and legs would evolve out of them?
I agree that it is hard to understand why God answers some prayers and not others which is what I think you're getting at. The only thing that I can definitely tell you is that he does definitely do the miraculous from time to time. Why and when exactly - I don't know and never will...
Given the premiss of this thread I can understand why you see my post as a retreat, but I am not nor have I ever been a proponent of Intelligent Design in the form that qualifies evolution. My approach to ID ( as a possibility ) is cosmological. I presented the post you quote merely as a possible explanation for the seeming inefficiency of the world. Maybe the designer was bored and wanted to see how the story would go so the designer threw in an element of uncertainty. In this case the designer designed something that would evolve however it evolved and which even it (the designer) might find unpredictable but entertaining. Your suggestion that the inefficiency of the world implies incompetence on the part of the designer assumes that the designer valued efficiency but was unable to achieve it. You're ascribing a specific motive to the designer ( desire for efficiency ) which may not be the case. Another possibility is that the designer set things up so that free-willed beings ( such as us humans ) would be inevitable, in which case the world would be deterministic up to the point that said free-willed beings arrived; then the fun begins. "Why not just start with a world with free-willed beings in it?" you ask. Why the 13 billion year lead-in? If we assume that the designer is a timeless entity then 13 billion years or 13 nanoseconds are relatively the same (relative to eternity). In the mind of the designer the 13 billion years may have been the moment of creation. Maybe, if the end product is still unrealized, the moment of creation is still underway. There are many possible ways of accommodating cosmological ID to what we perceive as inefficiency in the world.
We are almost certainly incapable of knowing the mind of God and so can't grasp God's motives, but if God answers a frivolous prayer and ignores a desperate one it has to make you wonder about the nature of God's attitude to our sufferings. Maybe God needs us to suffer so that we can understand something. Jesus suffered. Maybe God suffers.