Freeman Dyson - Is Intelligent Design Evidence of God?

[Laird]

[Embedded video from the OP snipped for better page loading]

A few comments on this:

It's interesting as a purportedly "non-scientific" argument from design, the typical design arguments using premises established by - or, for the arguments' purposes, at least claimed to be established by - science, such as that the physical constants appear to be finely-tuned, or that there has not been enough time for a random walk over genes to have resulted in biologically relevant proteins.

I write "purportedly", but the apparent existence of purpose in the universe does indeed at face value seem to be difficult to establish on scientific grounds.

I wonder what Freeman would make of the skeptical argument that that's all that the existence of purpose in the universe is: (merely) apparent. I get the sense that he would respond that it self-evidently is not. I'm not sure whether that would satisfy a skeptic, but not much does, does it?

I also wonder what he would make of the common skeptical refrain, "we make our own purpose". Here, it seems at the very least open to him to respond that the apparent purpose goes beyond mere individuals, and applies to the full context in which we find ourselves.

I wonder too what he would make of the suggestion that his view that the proto-minds of quantum particles sum up to human consciousness is subject to the combination problem (which I regard as fatal), and, if he accepted that suggestion, how he would defend his view against that problem.

On that note, I wonder how he reconciles that combinatorial view with the other, apparently "decombinatorial", view that he suggested, in which we are fragments of a world soul.

Finally, Socinianism [WP] seems to describe the views of (Faustus) Socinus which he mentioned his own views had been compared favourably to. It's not clear to me exactly which aspects are comparable, but plausible candidates seem to be the denial of divine foreknowledge of free will acts, and the denial of Jesus Christ as preexisting the universe.