Hitchens addresses Intelligent Design (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 18, 2012, 19:36 (4396 days ago) @ xeno6696


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> Hitchens points at this: There is no epistemology inherent in the position. 
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> I've often tried to find clumsy ways to ask questions about it. I've read your book, but the question still is to be asked, how you *know* intelligence when you see it? You always wave it away with that "I know pornography when I see it" but its precisely that handwaving that is irritating. -Wait and see the current book now at the printer. 
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> We should spend some time trying to attack this notion of intelligence directly.-How does a code appear? All codes we know have intelligence behind them, so why not DNA? -The living cell is extremely complex and obviously filled with information to guide it. Yes, in a way an argument from incredulity, but the complexity is incredulous. And the degree of complexity we recognize today is multiplied tomorrow, as if the complexity is a bottomless pit of more and more complexity, which of course it is. -Is it your position to wait until all the research is in, 50-100 years from now? The complexity at that point will obviously be mind-boggling. So why wait to make a decision? The information that runs the cell must come from somewhere. I find it impossible to assume chance can create a living system, now that we know that the original cells of 3.6 byo, according to current research had to be as complex as the cells we study today. -The rule is still life comes only from life. Miller-Urey lightning in a bottle is now 60 years old. All research into origin of life has told us only what does not work. Enormous information had to go into the first living cell, because the monumental jump from inorganic chemistry of early Earth to life on Earth has not submitted to all the recent intelligent lab work. -Obviously chance vs. intelligence are the two sides of the issue. Can you offer a third?