And - in the ultimate irony - one of Susskind's books is titled "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design"

Every single name you have thrown out in this thread has been an absolute mockery of the work and beliefs those people actually have.

You are an embarrassment to this entire forum. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read what you have had to say.

I never claimed Penrose held any religious doctrine. It is you who are being dishonest by suggesting that I did. Thats not unexpected as you have a reputation of lying and then in the next breath accuse others of using your dispicable tactics.

Is Penrose an atheist? I don't know but it seems from that one quote he is certainly open to the existence of a purposeful operator.

"Illusion of Intelligent Design"? Like has the appearance of intelligent design? Susskind admits in the very title of his book that the universe has the appearance of intelligent design. Now once again I am not claiming that Susskind believes the universe is intelligently designed....I have never ever said that.

It very hard to take you and Max seriously when I say, "Susskind admits the universe has the appearance of intelligent design" and then you guys turn around and say, "No he doesn't"

Its staring you right in the face man!

No, you just tried to quote mine him to support your own and conveniently forgot to include that he doesn't actually think the universe was designed - and even wrote a book expounding on the topic - even though he said it appeared designed.

So basically you are claiming the baseball bat laying on the ground is blue, and you have found a few scientists in the world that might say that the bat appears blue but in fact is not.

Boy what an extremely compelling argument this is that the baseball bat is blue.

What you don't understand is this. The more you admit to yourself that the universe has the appearance of being intelligently designed...the harder it becomes to reject the notion of an intellect behind it. The more we look at the universe the more it appears to be fine tuned.

Now you can come up with explainations for that appearance, but those explainations entail things which are completely unobservable....completely unfalsifiable...you can't even really call those explanations science.

We are at a point where our understanding of the cosmos is so detailed that to be an atheist you have to accept explainations simply on faith and reject others simply on faith. In that environment rational minds will move from patently rejecting the notion of God to being open to it(even if they still favor something else).

Why do you think most atheist refer to themselves as weak atheists? Hard atheism has become increasingly untenable.

What makes you think that the universe is any more "designed" for humans than the ocean is "designed" for fish? Was the ocean designed for fish? Or did fish just evolve to best make use of the ocean? Was the sky "designed" for birds? Or did birds just evolve to best make use of the sky? You realize the answers to these questions, right? What was Mars or Venus or any of the other barren planets with no intelligent life in our solar system "designed" for? To just be pretty snowballs circling a big ball of gas for billions of years? Great job god!

Life is a product of it's environment; once that life arises it is going to look like the environment was "designed" for whatever life arises in it because whatever life arose in that environment aptly made use of the resources available to it. That's what you don't understand.

It doesn't help to talk about the ocean being designed for fish....instead you should be asking why do stars form? Why do stars make heavy elements. Why do heavy elements make chemical compounds. Why do chemical compounds organize themselves into entities which self replicate. Why do these self replicating entities evolve in complexity and consciousness.....

You can't chalk it up to some evolutionary process. There isn't some random mutation that caused stars to form. Star formation and everything else that follows....including evolution itself....is a consequence of the rules. Those rules appear to be taking the universe somewhere. The universe appears to be designed in such a way to facilitate the transformation of matter/energy from simple states with no consciousness or intellect into states of greater and greater complexity and intellect/consciousness.

The laws of physics and the componets which make up the universe seem to moving toward some goal or end product. That implies a purpose and a purpose implies a designer.

"The ocean appears to be designed in such a way to facilitate the evolution of single-celled microbes into fish."

"The sky appears to be designed in such a way to facilitate the evolution of single-celled microbes into birds."

Because of gas, dust and gravity. Your god is not needed.

Because of complex processes of physics. Your god, once again, is not needed. Physics is needed. That's all. Can you point to somewhere in the process where god is needed to intervene or it all falls apart? No you can't. Every single part of the processes you speak, we have observed occurring naturally. The only part that we do not currently understand in the entire chain is the ultimate reason for why the universe exists/expanded to begin with. Which is only a question mark, it's not a free pass to insert your god.

Your god is not needed to explain any of this.

wat? This seems to be nothing more than "**** in the universe seems to be changing a lot and I as a human would like to attach meaning to it"

Why do intellect and consciousness exist? It didn't have to be that way and given the fact that it is so hard to replicate it is very likely to be a rare outcome as the consequence of any given set of rules.

Atheists response: We just got super duper quadrouper lucky thats all.

As an anomalous result of natural selection, sexual selection, and evolution. I suspect as combination of factors; a few being that the smarter our ancestors were the more likely they were to survive combined with the fact that females chose to mate with higher intellectual individuals more often than not in an effort to be afforded more food, (smart animals tend to kill better) better chance at escaping death, and being better at raising and teaching their young and befriending other tribes which could afford them benefits. If we did not develop these social and intellectual skills, we would be extinct along with many other lines of our ancestors who, in a shocking turn of events, had smaller skulls and smaller brains when compared to h0m0 sapiens.

Let me rephrase. Why is this universe perfectly suited for the existence intellect and consciousness?

It's not. It took over 13 billion years for it to occur here. And only one species on the planet has developed it to the point of being able hold down a technological society. And this planet is in the goldilocks zone, meaning that it is temperate and happens to suit life as we know it. The vast, vast majority of planets do not fall into this category.

The universe is largely empty and barren or hostile to life as we understand it. However, I can understand how those who refuse to look beyond our little hotspot called Earth can be ignorant of this fact.

I suspect, if you could truly characterize this universe as "perfectly suited for the existence of intellect" we A: would see other species on Earth with the ability to develop technology etc. and B: would have been visited or contacted by an alien species. The fact that neither of those two things has happened, and it took our species 13 billion years of suffering-filled evolution does not support your characterization of the universe.

On the scale taking into consideration the lifespan of the universe....intellect and consciousness arose almost instaneously.

I won't address the rest of your post because that is about biological life which is seperate and distinct from intellect and consciousness. You simply wasted a bunch of words by completely failing to address the question.

H0m0 sapiens evolved between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago. The universe is 13.7 billion years old.

Perhaps you can say what you mean by "intellect and consciousness" since you do not like what the words actually mean.

The lifespan of the universe is probably going to be over a googleplex years. 13.7 billion years is not even a blink on that timescale.

Why is that probable?

Pardon?

Also, even if that is probable - which I'm almost 100% sure you cannot demonstrate that - the universe will - we can only assume - continue to be expanding during all that time. As the universe expands it will cool and become to cold to sustain life or "intellect and consciousness". And guess what. Those stars you were talking about before? They will exhaust all of their fuel and dust and eventually there would be no stars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_...se#cite_note-1

Does this sound like it can be realistically characterized as a universe that is "perfectly suited for the existence intellect and consciousness"?

And how far will intellect and consciousness advanced in the tens of trillions of years it will take for that to happen?

Even if we take into account the time scale running from the big bang to the demise of the last star intellect and consciousness will still look like it had arisen in a mere blink or an eye.

How did I know you weren't going to reply to "Why is it probable the lifespan of the universe will be over a googleplex?" Is it, maybe, because you have no reason to believe that and just threw it out as desperate random speculation to support an untenable position?

Dude, we know of one (1) technological civilization in the entire universe right now. We know of one species with what you call "intellect". The vast majority of planets and solar systems that we know are barren and do not contain any signs of life or "intellect". We know various ways in which life on earth, and elsewhere in the cosmos will be harmed and go extinct, and eventually not even be possible. Every single fact we have in front of us about the universe points to this being a universe that allows very temporary "intellects" to arise and then to be promptly wiped out - and eventually will NEVER be able to arise.

Your statement that the universe is "perfectly suited for the existence intellect and consciousness" is an absurd overstatement of the properties and constructs in the universe which has absolutely no other support than to say "well, I'm just going to assume that the universe will survive for an unimaginably long time and then also assume that in that time other "intellects and consciousnesses" will arise, improve and prosper, not for any evidential or observational reasons, but, well, just because I like the idea."

Penrose is saying that the math and physics at the end of our universe are identical with the math and physics of our universe's beginning (singularity). Accordingly, the ending is another beginning. So, if true, the potential for intelligent life won't be gone forever but will continue to be forever and whether designed or not reality is structured in such a way that intelligent life is inevitable, forever.

You sure you're not confusing Penrose with The Matrix's Architect?

Life and consciousness will likely only be possible for on the order of 0% of the lifespan of the universe.

While I resent using words like "infinity" or throwing around random numbers when dealing with science, the close to 0% of the lifetime of the universe is most likely right.

We don't know the facts because they have not happened yet, but we can make educated guesses. Life is probably quite extinct (again) from the entire universe when enough time has passed by.