>Here's a thought experiment.
>We find a wall with a little door in it. Occasionally, that door opens,
>and small complex artifacts emerge. Maybe these are sonnets, or
>pencils, or integrated circuits, or plaster busts of Mozart -- whatever.
***"Whatever" indeed! Out of that same little door come not only Mozart by
TB, Malaria, smallpox, VD, poisons, fangs, stingers, gaping mouths, sticky
tongues, cancers, birth defects, and a planet whose biological life is
sustained by parasitism with the bacteria and plants parasitizing the rocks
and minerals and other plants and dead animal remains, and even some
insects;
meanwhile the animals parasitize the plants and each other, even the
smallest viruses feasting on the largest and smartest vertebrates, one big
buffet where few of the creatures born ever reach the age of reproduction,
and all served on a platter of rock that collides intermittently with other
rocks
as it floats though an endless empty ocean of space where black holes,
destructive radiation, novas, and even a star that passes nearby, can fry
the
whole platter.
(Indeed, why don't we reinforce in our kids THOSE facts, and call it the
"Intelligent Tinkerer hypothesis?" An hypothesis lying half-way between
that
of an Intelligent Designer and no Designer at all?)
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