Cosmic Intelligence (Agnosticism)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:09 (5645 days ago)

David Turell in "The issue of chance" 7 June 23:42 wrote: "I believe my intelligence is a small part of the universal intelligence, and thus 'we are made in the image of god'." - This is a common trope of religious believers and new-age thinkers. For me mind or intelligence means the activity of the human brain. The only form of intelligence we know is embodied in the physical brain. Roughly speaking ideas exist in the brain in electrical or chemical form. Intelligence lies in the way we are able to link these ideas and change these links. Those who believe in disembodied intelligence need to provide some model of how it could possibly work. - I looked through DHW's text and found two references to "intelligence", both are in discussions of Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion. - In section 1: To the suggestion that "there must be a cosmic intelligence who deliberately did the tuning" [of the universe], he {Dawkins} responds: "I have already dismissed all such suggestions as raising bigger problems than they solve" (p. 147). But who says that different, unsolved (possibly insoluble) problems invalidate a proposition? - In section 2: His faith, prejudice and self-contradiction are encapsulated in an extraordinary paragraph quite early on in his thesis: "Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is someone who believes there is nothing beyond the natural physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body, and no miracles ... except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural" (p. 14). - The point is that intelligence as we know it is indeed a natural phenomenon existing in the material world and open to investigation by science. Those who propose that it can somehow be projected onto the universe or cosmos need to be more explicit about how this occurs, rather than just being wish-fulfillment on their part. The only intelligence we know is a natural phenomenon that has arisen through evolution. The idea that it could exist outside the material universe is just a pipe-dream.

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GPJ