Fred Hoyle, former atheist (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 08, 2013, 19:53 (4217 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Why, then, do you think Hoyle became an agnostic instead of a believer?-DAVID: Hoyle's beliefs about the universe:
" The Intelligent Universe
"Genes from outside the Earth are needed to drive the evolutionary process". "Even after widening the stage for the origin of life from our tiny Earth to the Universe at large, we must still return to the same problem that opened this book - the vast unlikelihood that life, even on a cosmic scale, arose from non-living matter". It is apparent that the origin of life is overwhelmingly a matter of arrangement by intelligent control. Unintelligent natural selection is only too likely to produce an unintelligent result [34]. "If on occasions my opposition to the Darwinian theory has seemed fierce, it is because of my feeling that a society oriented by that theory is very likely set upon a self-destruct course". "Darwinism with its philosophy that opportunism is all" ... "leading with mounting inevitability to two World Wars. "I am not a Christian."-http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho47.htm-DAVID: Very close to my thinking, but all the way to a God. Sort of a Spinoza-like panpsychist, but with enough residual doubt to stop there.-I presume you mean NOT all the way to a God. Hoyle's opposition to the "opportunistic" philosophy derived from evolution has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of a designer, and should therefore not be placed in that context. The "panpsychist" element can but need not eliminate the God hypothesis (see Whitehead). However, if Hoyle stops short, as do so many of the scientists you quote in your support, perhaps the doubt is more fundamental than residual!