What is Nature’s Worst Design?Francisco Ayala Answers "The human reproductive system. Twenty percent of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions and miscarriages in the first two months. In the world, that’s 20 million abortions per year. Twenty million abortions per year? You wouldn’t want to blame God for that."Francisco Ayala is the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology,&Evolutionary Biology and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He has also been awarded £1 million by the Templeton Foundation for propagating such ideas.For those who believe that Ayala's defence of evolution in the face of creationists in the USA was a purely scientific stance, think again. Unlike many Christians in the US, the Vatican has come out against both creationism and ID and in favour of evolution. Although some may feel that the Galileo affair happened a long time ago, the Vatican is still licking its wounds over this and does not want to appear stupid in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence ever again. The only way to avoid looking foolish is to concede as much territory to science as is expedient and to draw the line at those issues in which it demands - demands! - moral superiority or supernatural authority through faith. We have not come very far from Aquinas and Ayala was acting as the good new Catholic, son of the Vatican II Council.The above quote by Ayala has to be put into this context. Catholics are against abortion, so God is also against abortion. But natural miscarriages are natural and yet Ayala wants to class them as abortions. But if they are natural then they are part of nature and if God created the universe then he also created natural miscarriages. The vast majority of the universe will kill you. Does that make most of creation bad? Looking at the universe from the standpoint of such metaphysical fiction then one could be forgiven for thinking that not only does God enjoy playing dice but he also likes a bit of Russian roulette on the side.Given the loaded nature of the very question, it could be argued that nature's worst design is the theological mind. But that would be falling into the trap of thinking that the question itself is meaningful - it isn't; it's a theological question masquerading as a scientific one.