Re: George Coyne and Richard Dawkins

Kerr-Mudd, John <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:

On Wed, 22 May 2024 07:44:39 -0700
John Harshman <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:
 
[time for a snip]

He got himself into that pickle by saying God is not an intervening
engineer. The alternative is that every living thing has a soul.

 
There are other alternatives. For example, the soul could be an emergent
property of the body, particularly of the brain. If he gave us brains
(mentioned above), souls could have come along with that, and perhaps
even gradually. Maybe chimps have near-but-not-quite-souls.
 

 
How about: God emerges from sapient (or could I say superstitious?) beings?
 

People created gods to make up for a puzzling explanatory gap and assuage
existential angst stemming from self-awareness and knowledge of eventual
death. The explanatory gap has shrunken but the fear of death remains.
Transhumanism, which btw has forefathers in Huxley and Teilhard, is merely
a technonerdish hope of cheating death.

George Coyne himself passed in 2020.