Re: [asa] An Intelligent Design Riddle

Nucacids wrote:
> Hi Murray,
>
> "So, my first run past the post is to ask whether this position isn't an
> "evasion" of the question. Analogous to the "answer" to biogenesis
> offered by theories of panspermia."
>
> Hmm. So if panspermia was true, we could never know it, because we are
> obligated to dismiss it as an evasion.

Hi Mike,

That's not what I meant - although in retrospect I perhaps created a confusion by using the wrong term: I should, correctly, have used the term "exogenesis" rather than "panspermia".

The point is that one doesn't answer the problem of the origin of life (abiogenesis) simply by suggesting that life arose elsewhere in the universe and that it subsequently arrived on Earth by whatever method. In that respect, exogensis is an "evasion" of the question of abiogenesis; i.e. in the sense that it does not DIRECTLY answer the question of the origins of life.

Introducing this subject, however, was simply an attempt to draw an analogy and it doesn't bear upon the central point. What I really wanted to get at was that I don't see that Gribbin's thesis solves the problem of intelligibility. It might solve it for this universe, of course, but it would seem to leave the bigger question - why is ANYTHING intelligible - unresolved.

It is, let me say, not a point I really care to unravel or defend. I was just pointing out, for Schwarzwald's benefit, what struck me as one of the difficulties with the thesis.

Blessings,
Murray

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Received on Wed Oct 21 13:53:54 2009