For a more blatant example, it seems unbelievably improbable that the optimum anatomical design would be so incredibly similar between small, tree-dwelling herbivores(monkeys), ground-dwelling omnivores (apes), and the rational beings created to love and worship their creator.
WHy would god create imperfect beings anyway? I think if you are going to play this game you have to either realize you have no idea what god's motivation (or in engineering jargon, requirements) are, and therefore you don't have much way to complain when her design recapitulates things we might do as finite designers. That we are imperfect certainly is an argument against an omnipotent omniscient god creating us, but only if you think that this god gives a crap about what we think of her choices and motivations.
I personally find the omniscient omipotent omnigood creator ridiculous pretty much for these reasons. But once "inside" the system, I don't think an economy of design energy is a particularly great place to hang my "and furthermore" hat.
Perhaps omnipotent god uses an efficiency of design because she would rather use her infinite resources to create a higher order of infinity of different sorts of intelligent beings all over the multivers than to do a really obsessive-compulsive job on just a lower-order of infinity of worlds like earth. Who knows.
Today's post, But There's Still A Chance, Right? was originally published on 06 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Failed Just-So Story, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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