Privileged Planet: another summary of evidence (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 23, 2018, 09:36 (2163 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTES: "At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Even slight changes to the relative masses of fundamental particles or to the strengths of fundamental forces, or to the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe or to its initial arrangement of mass and energy, would have rendered the universe incapable of sustaining life. In the 1960s, physicists had just begun to discover examples of such fine-tuning. Now they know of many more. This suggests “the common sense interpretation,” as Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, “that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

"Parallel developments in biology have reinforced this perspective. In the 1950s, Watson and Crick discovered that DNA contains digital information, which many biologists and computer scientists have likened to software code. Molecular biologists have since elucidated a complex information-processing system serviced by equally complex nano-machinery in even “simple” one-celled organisms. These discoveries have thwarted attempts to explain the origin of life by undirected processes. By 1980, Francis Crick would acknowledge that the origin of life appears “to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

DAVID: It should be noted Fred Hoyle was an atheist most of his life. A 'super intellect' must exist.

Thank you for this excellent summary of the case for a designer. (As you can imagine, I’m particularly interested in the reference to “simple” one-celled organisms.) This is the field in which I see your own speculations as entirely logical, unlike your speculations concerning the “super intellect’s” purposes and methods. I have no answer to the design argument – just as I have no answer to the question of how a super intellect can simply be there, if all life’s lesser intellects require a designer.