The Intelligent Cell (Origins)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 18:05 (4515 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: At least one website says that Lynn Margulis, though born Jewish, was an agnostic. That figures.

DAVID: She was Jewish and married to Carl Sagan. Why do so many Jews become agnostic? I have no idea, but I think it is the result of Reform Judaism diluting the religion without adding anything meaningful.

I was raised in a Liberal Jewish family, but although I hated every aspect of my formal religious education (not my parents’ fault), it had nothing to do with my subsequent atheism. This came when in my teens I began to question what I’d been taught. Not only did I find the OT God thoroughly off-putting, for reasons I’ve already recounted many times over, but I could see no evidence even for the existence of such a being. It was Darwin who alerted me to the unfathomable complexities of life, which made me question how it could all have come about, and the very fact that he expressly avoided dealing with the origin of life made me open my mind again. Nothing I’ve heard or read since has enabled me to close my mind one way or the other. Your own book and posts on this forum have provided me with much of the scientific background that confirms the impossibility of knowing what started this process off, along with the degree of faith required if one is to believe in chance.

DAVID: You have arrived at my point of view, whether you realize it or not. My UI is what you are describing, 'as yet unknown to us'.

When I talk of “a form of intelligence as yet unknown to us”, it is the vaguest possible concept. Your Universal Intelligence comes with all kinds of attributes, even though you often deny that it has any. You frequently use the name “God”, you believe in a deliberate design with pre-planning, you see humans as the chosen species, the culmination of a divine project. I sometimes suspect that you think it has a personal interest in us, though you tend to play that down. And maybe you’re right, but that is way, way beyond my imaginings. The unknown intelligence for me is totally indefinable. I have no idea what form or qualities it might have. It’s so vague as to be meaningless – a something, a life force perhaps, to which an atheist might also subscribe. If cells can combine to invent new organs, to repair those that exist, to keep us breathing, moving, digesting, thinking, how can one even begin to conceive of THEIR intelligence, let alone something all-embracing? So although I’m hugely in debt to yourself, and to others who keep confronting me with new and fascinating insights into the complexities of the universe, life, the body, the mind, religion and science, there is NO concept that doesn’t call up a host of unanswerable questions. I therefore remain firmly seated on my picket fence of not knowing and not even believing. Sorry to disappoint you!