On May 2, 2005, at 11:09 AM, Gary Denton wrote:
Robert Sawyer has a novel about intelligent design. A spaceship lands at a Toronto museum and an alien gets out and says take me to you paleontologist. The aliens are studying the actions of "God" on several worlds in this part of the galaxy. It is not a God that any Christian fundamentalist would recognize.
_Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_.
In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current "big bang" expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how that entity managed to survive the previous universe's "big crunch". That's a pretty significant omission, to me.
And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, but two literal deus ex machina events.
Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the idea of "god" finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat.
In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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