"Intelligent design"


In William Safire's _On Language_ column -- which deals with
the phrase "intelligent design" -- in today's _New York
Times_, I reed

[Einstein's] recent biographer, Dennis Overbye, a
science reporter for The Times, says: "Einstein
believed there was order in the universe but that
it had not been designed for us."

It was gratifying to me to read that, because I've long felt
the following:

It's reasonable to believe that the enormous
complexity of life on Earth implies an intelligent
designer, but it's absurd to assume the designer
had to be anthropocentric.

People come up with strange definitions of "atheist". They
even go so far as to say that anyone is not an atheist who
believes life with all its complexity proves the existence
of G*O*D, whether or not that god was concerned about or
even has noticed the existence of humans.

To me the only acceptable definition of "atheist" is that
it's anyone who doesn't believe in an *anthropocentric* god.

As for the phrase "intelligent designer", if I were to
believe that one exists or has existed, I wouldn't assume
that the intelligence referred to was the intelligence
that's a characteristic of human beings. I would rather
believe that it's something vaguely akin to what we know as
intelligence, but so vastly superior to it that we're
incapable of conceiving what it's like.

I find it interesting to speculate that there was an entity
-- which I will call T*E*R*A*S*M*A*R*T until someone
suggests a beter name -- that was possessed of this superior
form of "intelligence", and that it designed all of the
mind-boggling intricacy of life processes as we know them.
But I like to further imagine that T*E*R*A*S*M*A*R*T was
destroyed in the Big Bang, and evolution has been proceeding
uncontrolled and unsupervised ever since.

Yes, I know, it may have been a few billion years from the
time of the Big Bang until the first appearance of life on
Earth, but T*E*R*A*S*M*A*R*T could have designed all of the
mechanisms and embedded in the post-Big Bang matter the
means to get them started when the time was ripe.


.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: "Intelligent design"
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