Hitchens addresses Intelligent Design (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 17:24 (4415 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: My meditations always return to the fact that our wishes for an eternal caregiver are facile: I'm far more likely to be a maltheist than a theist.
> 
> I find Maltheism just as blinkered as Eutheism (the belief that God is good). Maltheists rightly ... in my view ... say that if God is all good, where the heck did evil come from. Well, if God exists and created human consciousness, and he is purely evil, where the heck did love, charity, empathy, sympathy, philanthropy, altruism come from? The only clue we have as to the nature of a possible creator is the nature of what he has created, and for me by far the greatest likelihood is that he made us in his image ... i.e. a mixture of what you and I hold to be good and bad.
> -For a blinding second, the incredulity of chance or a conscious creator enveloped my mind in such a way that the thoughts were tangible things: and the incredulity was equal. -I get it now: I really do. -> I suggested that David's idea of God hiding behind a "wall of quantum uncertainty" was a fine, scientific-sounding term for my agnostic picket fence.
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> MATT: And let's not forget: Quantum physics requires an observation.
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> Just two comments here: 
> 1) The word "quantum" is now used to give virtually any phrase a cachet of scientific respectability. David could just as easily have called it a wall of uncertainty.
> 
> 2) Your remark raises an interesting issue. Religious people often go on about how we need their God, but they rarely consider their God's need for us. What would he be without humans (maybe ETs as well?) to worship him, puzzle over him, question him, pray to him, doubt him, please him, anger him, entertain him? Just an infinite expanse of bored energy.-It's that last statement here that really gets my mind thinking creative... and funny things. A novel about an immensely bored God... well I'll finish the one about the "Devil who Gave Up" before I tackle that idea... but there's a story in there. -(And November is national novel writing month... My goal is to complete my first draft by the end of the month, then begin the process of distillation...)

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"