Hitchens addresses Intelligent Design (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 14:15 (4416 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [My agnostic balance is based]...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: Can you avoid the idea that something has to be eternal? One does not get something from nothing. The famous question, why is there anything?, has an answer. There has always been an eternal something.-Agreed. The debate concerns whether that something is conscious or not.-Dhw: David, I think your "wall of quantum uncertainty" is a fine, scientific-sounding term for my agnostic picket fence.-DAVID: But the fence has two sides and two areas, and as a boundary there is something in both of them. If the other side for you is the possibility of chance, remember chance is a concept, and is not material or energy. What is left is pure energy.-This is casuistry. On one side is the concept of design, on the other the concept of chance. On one side is conscious energy, on the other unconscious energy.