Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 14:20 (4048 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: What is "intelligent information"? A chunk of rock contains a bookful of information, but it takes an intelligent mind to extract it and systematize it. That doesn't mean the rock was designed and created by an intelligent mind.
 -DAVID: The information I am referring to is the information that creates the complex design of the universe, the even more complex design of living matter. Inorganic matter such as rocks contain information about crystaline structure, mineral content, presence of elements, etc. However, this information does not detail any complex active design, because there is none.-Doesn't the balance of our planet depend as much on inorganic materials as on organic? And so far as we know, isn't the rest of the universe also composed of inorganic matter? Didn't your God design all the inorganic, appearing and disappearing chemicals and gases, stars and suns, planets and black holes that make up our universe? Where, then, do you draw the line between "intelligent" and "non-intelligent" information? (This question could be quite important for the "third way".)-Dhw: Once again, we have instances of a form of "intelligence" we do not understand. Cells like ants like crows like dogs like humans have their own means of communicating and of taking decisions. Applied to energy transmuted into matter, this innate "intelligence" is Nagel's "third way".-DAVID: Life arrived quickly on Earth. And the first life forms were very complex, based on Archaea studies. There is nothing innate about the intelligence that made life. Rocks can't think and the Earth was nothing but rocks, a little soil and water when life started in the oceans. And meteorites did not bring the right amino acids or other organic molecules to make RNA. Darwin's warm, little pond is a pipedream, not Chuck's fault for imagining it as he didn't know any better, but Darwinists clinging to the dream is what is maddening.-All that we know is that once upon a time (perhaps some 4 billion years ago) various chemicals combined to make life on Earth. We don't know where some of them came from, how they got together, how they sparked from inorganic to organic, or how they managed to reproduce and innovate. By all means let us speculate and theorize, but just as "maddening" as the atheist claim that they all cosied up in a warm little pond is the theist's claim that an unknowable, infinite, self-aware mind that came from nowhere telekinetically created and fiddled around with the cosmos, and telekinetically created and fiddled around with microscopic globules. There is no scientific evidence of any kind that chance can create life. There is no scientific evidence of any kind that a supreme being exists. Some of us accept that science may not be capable of explaining life or many of the strange phenomena we experience in life, but again we can do no more than speculate and theorize about these. The multiplicity of speculations and theories is enough to show that we haven't a clue. And yet the speculators and theorists on both sides of the fence genuinely believe their speculations and theories are right, and everyone else is wrong. Actually, I don't find it "maddening" so much as bewildering. And fascinating. And stimulating. Well worth opening up a website for discussion, wouldn't you say?