At Huffington Post, John Blumenthal wheels out the venerable and vacuous “bad design” argument as if he were the first to think of it:
Thanks to Michele Bachmann, the tired concept of Intelligent Design has once again become a topic of conversation among Creationists, most of whom, ironically, often sound like Neanderthals. In case you don’t know, this boneheaded theory claims that the human body is simply too remarkable to have come into being through millions of years of haphazard evolution, and that some super-intelligent deity must have been the engineering wizard behind the miracle of our anatomies.
Miracle? Really? If you’re over 50 and your body is starting to fall apart, it’s pretty obvious that the design is anything but intelligent.
Oh, the wit! For some reason, the former Playboy magazine editor has never heard of redemptive suffering and assumes that any Designer worth his salt would have created a universe where everyone has a rollicking orgy in his own Playboy Mansion until one day, he has a painless death. How cruel of the Designer not to have taken Hugh Hefner’s plan for a fulfilling life as a model.
Apparently it also never occurred to Mr. Blumenthal that some of the bodily complaints that he mentions (penile warts, for instance) might be a product of the sufferer’s own idiotic lifestyle choices.