Depends on what is being meant by God. If you mean the God of creationists, then yeah that seems to be a fair question to ask. But even then the question might be to do with bad default thinking on our part.

If you want to be creative with some counters, you can have a God that created all possible worlds, and in some worlds animals defecate because these worlds allow for such to happen.

You can also have a God that created this one world and then let nature take care of (most of) the rest for whatever reasons. As a result we get defecating animals.

(August 16, 2020 at 10:24 pm)possibletarian Wrote:

(August 15, 2020 at 11:27 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: God created all the animals, right? So he created all their systems, right? So the best system for taking in energy and disposing of waste involves shit, right? Nothing better occurred to an omnipotent omniscient being?

And I know there will be a lot of "yeah, butt!" posts. Please prove your points.

You only have to look at the world to see that a good designer didn't design anything, your point is perhaps one of many.

Humanity is very vulnerable, the earth is very vulnerable, clearly only a lunatic would believe that  a creature that claimed to be perfect made it.

Very! The farthest known object in the Universe is 33 billion light years away. If we consider that might be the edge of a sphere of space then humans are well and truly put in their place. Man's ego might be as large as ever, but the box it came in has grown to colossal size.

(August 16, 2020 at 5:56 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: This applies to any system, not just biological ones, that consume fuel and produce waste. A locomotive that uses 100 pounds of coal per mile and belches ten pounds of carbon into the atmosphere is clearly less efficient than an equivalent one that uses 10 pounds per mile and emits one pound of carbon (or whatever the actual figures are - it doesn’t really matter). I can state this is true without knowing how locomotives work. 

Sorry for the double response. This comparison between cars and animals didn't sit right with me but I wasn't familiar enough with cars to respond. After doing a bit of research I'm convinced that the concept of "waste" is not comparable across the two categories.

To understand why, we need to take an ecological approach. Coal exists in deposits and are therefore isolated from the ecosystem. When coal is mined and subsequently burned it is introducing emission into the ecosystem that negatively affects the balance of the environment. For example, Sulfur Dioxide contributes to acid rain and Carbon Dioxide contributes to the green house effect. It is this introduction of new chemicals into an ecosystem that makes the waste of car emission incomparable to the waste found in feces.

Biological ecosystems in comparison have two key properties: Energy enters into it through sunlight and passes through. And chemicals are constantly being recycled. Carbon in a biological ecosystem is never "wasted" it is simply recycled constantly between living and nonliving things. Plants, take up ingredients from the ground, and pass it herbivores, which pass it to carnivores. And when an animal defecates or dies, decomposers transform them back into inorganic matter to be taken up by plants again. 

In other words. Cars produce waste because their emissions introduce chemicals into the environment that measurably pollute the environment. Animals do not have such waste; their feces continues a cycle of chemicals within an ecosystem, and nothing is lost or introduced into the environment. The word waste when it comes to animals is perhaps a misnomer when compared to anything like car emissions.

I've often thought it would be cool to design a food that gave the body exactly what it needed so that there was no waste generated. I would allow for pee because that is just part of hydrating properly. The largest reason why I have not thrown myself into the task of creating such a food comes from a passage written by William S. Burroughs in his book, "Naked Lunch"

"TERMINAL addicts often go two months without a bowel move and the intestines make with sit-down-adhesions --Wouldn't you? -- requireing the intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent... Such is life in The Old Ice House. Why move around and waste TIME?"

I haven't tried Huel nor have I tried Soylent either but from the list of ingredients I imagine they would create some truely greasy shits so that would be worse than my current diet of, well, whatever sounds good at the moment.

You are a biochemical system that ingests high energy biochemical material and excretes low energy, high entropy biochemical waste. We literally make shit happen. To make things worse, the eficiency is a paltry 10% per trophic level. That means that it takes 1000 lbs of grass to make 100 lbs of zebra, 10 lbs of cheetah, and 1 lb of buzzard. There is no evidence that we interact with any form of Divine or supernatural energy. This is exceptionally good evidence that you are evolved biochemistry, not Divine creation.

(August 24, 2020 at 12:39 am)Paleophyte Wrote: You are a biochemical system that ingests high energy biochemical material and excretes low energy, high entropy biochemical waste. We literally make shit happen. To make things worse, the eficiency is a paltry 10% per trophic level. That means that it takes 1000 lbs of grass to make 100 lbs of zebra, 10 lbs of cheetah, and 1 lb of buzzard. There is no evidence that we interact with any form of Divine or supernatural energy. This is exceptionally good evidence that you are evolved biochemistry, not Divine creation.

Actually, those terms creates a overoptimistic impression of how much energy we extracted, and how little energy remains in the excrement that’s could have been extracted,but were left extracted by the ad hoc process jerked hither and tithes By an chaotic array of circumstances rather than intelligently controlled and optimized. 

People don’t burn cow patties for fuel because it was low energy and cow digest was efficient.

Living creatures produce waste because their emissions also introduce chemicals that measurably pollute the environment. This is a fact, and if you need to deny such a fact for some other thing you believe to hold water - then this other thing that you believe does not hold water.

The most immediately concerning waste product is ammonia, which is absurdly toxic...and especially at the levels present with some species. The idea that this is not waste because, in some sense, it's a natural process, is ludicrous. Natural processes make cars work, too. A thing being natural does not prevent that thing from being a pollutant...an the muh vaunted "balance of nature" is a myth that belongs in the same set as gods. It's a pretty euphemism for a snapshot in time and process, where we count up what the meat grinder has left intact and say, ah this sausage has x% of this and y% of that - balance!

If these processes are gods idea...though, or gods chosen processes, then yes - god chose inefficient and damaging processes which necessitate that life continually destroys other life in order to perpetuate it's own. If that's a problem for a given christian - they have a problem with the god of this world. Not to fear, though, we lowly human worms have made significant improvements to gods chosen processes, and most of these specifically focused towards reducing pollution and death. I do it for a living.

(August 24, 2020 at 7:19 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Living creatures produce waste because their emissions also introduce chemicals that measurably pollute the environment....

The most immediately concerning waste product is ammonia, which is absurdly toxic...and especially at the levels present with some species.  The idea that this is not waste because, in some sense, it's a natural process, is ludicrous.  Natural processes make cars work, too.  

This is basic restoration ecology, which is why it gets taught in introductory biology textbooks.

Ammonium is an important source of nitrogen, which is subsequently an important building block for amino acids and the synthesis of proteins. Plants need nitrogen, and they make direct and indirect use of ammonium to get it. Ammonium is made available to plants by two processes: Nitrogen-fixating bacteria convert it from the atmosphere while ammonifying bacteria convert it from decomposing matter, and finally, nitrate is produced form ammonium by nitrifying bacteria. Plants then use ammonium directly or convert nitrate back to ammonium to produce amino acids and grow.

In animals the reverse occurs; when proteins and nucleic acids are used for energy, nitrogen is removed in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is, as you mentioned, toxic for animals (not for nitrifying bacteria or plants). It interferes with our oxidative phosphorylation; which is why land animals convert it to urea by combining it with carbon dioxide, aquatic animals dilute it with large amounts of water, and insects synthesize it into uric acid; all facilitating its excretion from the body.

This is all part of the nitrogen cycle: "a series of natural processes by which certain nitrogen containing substances from the air and soil are made useful to living things, are used by them, and are returned to the air and soil" (Campbell et al., 2016, p. 813).

Reference: Campbell, N., Cain, M., Minorsky, P., Reece, J., Urry, L. and Wasserman, S., 2013. Biology. 10th ed. pp.1233-1250.

Ammonia is toxic to plants and to animals and to nitrifying bacteria - it is an environmental pollutant that alot of time and effort and money goes into dealing with. Ammonia is part of the nitrogen cycle, auto emmisions - the carbon cycle. All pollutants are natural in this trivial sense, and being natural in this trivial sense of occurring in some natural cycle does not change the fact that they are environmental pollutants.

If some belief you have requires that you deny this fact in order to hold water - that belief does not hold water.

(August 24, 2020 at 1:10 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: "it is an environmental pollutant that alot of time and effort and money goes into dealing with"

If a lot of time and effort goes into dealing with it, then it is probably a problem arising from human activity, like auto emissions. My guess would be the farming of animals, as an example.