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Rab, Next, you managed to use your mysteriously garnered
extra time to put together a thought provoking paper which we should all
discuss. I had a couple of initial thoughts that I
didn’t get a chance to make, so here they are, but I will put give it the
detailed thought it deserves. But first, I doff my hat to Douglas Adam’s
response to our idea that the universe has been designed for us. “It's rather like a
puddle waking up one morning— I know they don't normally do this, but
allow me, I'm a science fiction writer— A puddle wakes up one morning and
thinks: "This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me
very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly... I mean really precise isn't it?...
It must have been made to have me in it." The sun rises and it's
continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to
have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and
shrinking and shrinking— and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's
still thinking— it's still trapped in this idea that— that the hole
was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us we will
continue to destroy it in the way that we have been destroying it, because we
think that we can do no harm.”
Your analogy example of
the secret agent who miraculously survives a poison gas attack by the
mysterious gathering of the poisons at one end of the cabin while he remained
safely ensconced in an oxygen bubble made me doubt the design theory even more. Let me give you a counter
example. I become a star premiership footballer and I employ one of the
world’s most eminent architects to design a 55 bedroom mansion. But
mysteriously he fills the 23 reception rooms, the 14 marble bathrooms, the
snooker room, dining room, bar, and 54 bedrooms with noxious gasses, making
them uninhabitable. In fact, only one back
bedroom is inhabitable, but luckily it’s very nicely decorated. This would appear to be
similar to the job that the designer, should it exist, has done on the
universe. That strikes me as very unintelligent design! If I were to hold six
dice in each hand and roll them all simultaneously, and the all came up six,
would we be led to believe that the dice were loaded? I think we could conceive
that they just happened to come out that way – and in the same way I can
still conceive that the 12 constatns came out the way the did by chance and,
luckily enough, that gave the conditions for life to evolve. There are alternatives
out there. The brilliant physicist Lee Smolin’s interesting proposal that
if evolution is a phenomenon of nature then the Universe could have evolved
stability is certainly a fascinating idea.
Since the title of your
paper stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools as an
alternative to multiple universe theory, I thought I would make the point that,
although it’s some years since I did my physics A Level, I don’t
believe that multi-universe theory is taught in schools. It would be more
likely to come under a theoretical physics degree. So I wondered under what subject you would
teach it in school. If it forms part of the
RE syllabus, all well and good, though since you are postulating a scientific
process I would then expect RE to also include a robust case for non-ID. If not RE, where else
would you teach it? Physics? Biology? Chemistry? If you were to teach it
as a science, what exactly would you teach? Which prestigious University
science faculty has a body of Intelligent Design research? Where are the peer
reviewed papers that make up a body of knowledge that can be taught? Also, if you only taught
fine tuning to science classes, what about those pupils not studying sciences?
Would we have to have an ID section in every subject? This all seems very problematic
to me. Could you forward me a copy of the paper and
I’ll give it some more detailed though. Cheers, David |