Natural Teleology: More Thomas Nagel (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 06, 2013, 18:37 (4306 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Then your argument should not be that only an intellect can create information. You mean that only an intellect can plan. Agreed. However, that is the whole point of our discussion. Are the universe and life on Earth the result of planning, or of a higgledy-piggledy process of experimentation?-DAVID: Our 'plan', especially life, is so complex only an intellect can create it. Chance cannot as the article below shows you. [...] Again, your only other source of the planning is chance.-Oops! Your editing has truncated my list of options! I wrote: "Are the universe and life on Earth the result of planning, or of a higgledy-piggledy process of experimentation (by a self-aware experimenter), or of a higgledy-piggledy process of evolution (by chance, or by matter that is intelligent but not self-aware)?"-Only one of these four options leaves life to chance, and you have ignored the last of them (the panpsychist variant), which offers "intelligence" without God.- DAVID: All a matter of faith. I've made my choice. You cannot. Both reasonable.-I am very happy with this answer, just as I am very happy with your arguments against chance. Our difficulties don't arise from arguments AGAINST anything. The problem is arguments FOR (chance, various forms of God, various forms of panpsychism). These are always a matter of faith, and I do not find one faith more reasonable than another. But of course that is the essence of all our discussions, and by exchanging reasons for and against, I would like to think we all learn something.-Thank you for the latest batch of articles, including-http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2013/02/amateur-astronomer-hubble.html-I'm particularly interested in the ravenous black hole in M106, "actively devouring matter and spewing out jets of particles". Since you believe that your version of God planned our universe with the express purpose of creating us, I wonder if you have any thoughts on why he might have created these gulping, spitting black holes all over the place, with matter appearing and disappearing all the time. It all seems rather higgledy-piggledy to me.