Evolutionists are fond of citing Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is smarter than you are.” I have previously expressed skepticism about this rule (see here and here), but I’ve had no success in persuading people with a naturalistic metaphysical outlook. Yesterday, however, I came across a LiveScience article by Tia Glose titled, The Spooky Secret Behind Artificial Intelligence’s Incredible Power (October 9, 2016), which might prove to be a game-changer. We’ll see.

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Recently, I was browsing through the latest posts over at Evolution News and Views, and an anonymous article titled, Imagine: 60 Million Proteins in One Cell Working Together, caught my eye. By now, most readers at TSZ will be aware that I consider it overwhelmingly likely that the first living thing was designed. However, I’m also highly critical of attempts to over-egg the case for intelligent design. The article I read was one such attempt: it contained some unfortunate errors and omissions.

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In a recent post, keiths criticizes Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will theodicy, which (very briefly) goes as follows:

…[S]ome of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against his goodness: for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.
(Plantinga, Alvin (1967). God and Other Minds. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Pages 166-167.)

Keiths responds:

Suppose God creates each person with free will, so that everything he or she does during life is freely chosen. If God is omniscient, he knows what all of those choices will be before the person is even created. If God simply chooses not to create the people who will go on to commit rape (or even experience the desire to commit rape), then he has prevented those things from happening without depriving anyone of their free will.

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