Nick Lane: preference

Transcript context

…This is not my inclination, but if I were a God-fearing person, I would hear this and I’d be like, “Wow, this is a vindication of intelligent design.” The laws of the universe just favor this chemistry which leads to life, at least according to the story, so strongly that it’s hard to resist this formation. I’m curious about your interpretation. I agree with you. I find it almost a little disturbing. I have to say that I’m not a religious person either, but I don’t object to religion. I’m not a militant atheist at all. I like the fact that religions have searched for meaning and searched for origins. I have some fellow feeling with that search and truth in some sense, with a small T, in my own case. But insofar as this is consistent with the idea of a God, the God would be a deist God that effectively set the laws of the universe in motion and they’re left to play out. This is Einstein’s God. In terms of what most people understand by God, most people look for comfort in God and are looking for something which is meaningful to them and who’s been involved in humanity. This is a very cold kind of “God as thermodynamics” who sets the laws of the universe in motion, reproducibly gives rise to the same kinds of things. Yes, you could interpret it in a natural theistic way, but I don’t think many people would get that much comfort or meaning from that way of seeing the world. A very basic question, but if life is not only abundant but almost inevitable in all these rocky planets, then the bottleneck to not seeing aliens everywhere, presumably, is eukaryotes which leads to complexity.…

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