Hitchens addresses Intelligent Design (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 22, 2012, 17:34 (4392 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You started this website because of a desired response to Dawkins. He was so positively atheistic. Was this site to provide a measured agnostic stance on the fence, or did you hope to see answers that might lead to a choice? What I have provided has balanced the rantings of Dawkins and others...-The "brief guide" WAS a response to Dawkins, but I then expanded it to incorporate what I myself considered to be a balanced view. As for the purpose of the website itself, I have summed it up on the homepage: "The truth is out there somewhere, and by combining our discoveries, we may help one another to gain new insights." Did I hope for answers that might lead to a choice? I didn't set out with the object of getting myself converted one way or the other, if that's what you mean. I just wanted to share the search for whatever truths are out there, but without the "rantings" of the fundamentalists, both religious and anti-religious. It's been my good fortune that people like yourself, Matt, BBella, Tony, and in earlier times George, Mark, Whitecraw and others have indeed joined in the search and taken me to places where I had never been before.-DAVID: ...and I think [I have provided] proof beyond a reasonable doubt that there is an underlying greater power, a universal mind. And yes it is inconceivable if approached out of thin air. But you have admitted chance is not an option, so my UI wins.-Words need to be chosen far more carefully here. What you have proved is the unlikelihood (not the impossibility) of chance creating life and consciousness, but you cannot prove the existence of an equally unlikely (not impossible), uncreated, eternal and universal form of life and consciousness. Despite the starkness of the choice, I find both explanations inconceivable, and so neither wins!-MATT: Dhw's reasons may differ, but my *will to truth* demands that the case must be as *iron clad* as 1 + 1 = 2-Which of course it can never be, as you know from your own study of epistemology. The case of Eben Alexander shows that subjective experience can be enough to tip the balance (ditto many similar experiences), but that can never offer the objective level of proof that you demand. Perhaps it is the mystic side of your personality that holds you back from out-and-out materialism. My own agnostic balance is based: 1) on the complexity arguments that materialists try desperately to downgrade, and on a vivid awareness that the majority of my most profound experiences completely defy any materialist explanation; 2) on what I see as the utter impersonality of the cosmos and of Nature here on Earth, and on the inconceivability of a conscious mind that has existed for ever and is on such a vast scale that it can create universes.
 
DAVID (to Matt): God is concealed, presumably by choice. He is back there behind a wall of quantum uncertainty. You either jump across the chasm or you don't. And you are right. Ever since humans began to think, they have assumed a divine level.-He is either concealed, or he isn't there. I myself was not around when humans began to think, but David is older than me! If his statement is true, we then have to decide whether the assumption of divinity was the result of closeness to the true nature of things, or sheer ignorance. Science has certainly swept away vast swathes of early religious thinking, and yet the deeper it delves into the nature of life, consciousnness and the universe, the more mysterious these seem to become. David, I think your "wall of quantum uncertainty" is a fine, scientific-sounding term for my agnostic picket fence.