Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 06, 2013, 19:37 (3822 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We don't even know how the genome makes a phenotype. Talk about mysterious. There has to be a plan. Using our reality as a guide, plans come from intelligence. Unfortunately our brains eem to conjure up consciousness through changing DNA within the neuron, and all of it is probably acting at a quantum mechanical level, which we don't understand either. Amorphous disorganized energy is not a candidate for a reasonable theory, but a reasonable theory forces you to choose between chance and design.-As usual, you see clearly with one eye and keep the other firmly closed. You agree that the whole saga is one great mystery, and we understand nothing. You quite rightly pick holes in the hypotheses of chance and of unconscious energy, and yet you claim that some self-aware being of which you have not the slightest evidence or understanding must be responsible. What is reasonable about that? If order simply exists in the form of your God, how do you know that order does not exist in the form of a universe without a God? What we see is a non-stop sequence of comings and goings, so maybe that is the natural orderly/disorderly course taken by energy and matter, and has been so for ever and ever. You may cry: How do you explain life and consciousness? To which, alas, I must reply as Dawkins does: "How do you explain God?" That does not make either of you right or wrong. It merely makes a mockery of the claim that one hypothesis is more "reasonable" than the other.