I recently responded to a comment on an article reporting the newly successful transplantation of a computer-designed gene into the cell of a bacterium to create a successfully self-reproducing organism with a human-designed genome. The comment indicated that the writer feels this success puts the existence of God into question. My response follows:
Why is the assumption of any lawfulness in cosmic evolution, including everything from the beginning 13.7 billion years ago up to human level intelligence in organisms anywhere in the cosmos, any different from intelligence? Information theory makes no distinction between lawful function and intelligence. Do you? If so, why?
Further, the distinction between natural law and what it operates upon has been disappearing historically in our most successful theoretical models and seems to be approaching zero in the limit. We're pretty much there already for all practical purposes. In addition, explanatory power clearly proceeds from the global, abstract, and general to the local, concrete, and specific as illustrated by any simple algebraic equation.
Strictly local constructs are intrinsically special-case, as opposed to more comprehensive and general models. Our concepts of reality are reflexively conditioned by the mental constructs derived from intrinsically local, special-case sensory input, and are therefore comprehensively invalid at the scale of the cosmos. All our comprehensively successful theoretical models clearly demonstrate this. This is the fundamental difference between classical and modern theoretical models.
So since natural law operates recursively and comprehensively in referring exclusively to itself to generate continuous evolution in the structure of its manifestations everywhere locally, why is such abstract, self-referent lawfulness not equivalent to conscious intelligence at the cosmic scale of the hierarchy? And why arbitrarily confine conscious intelligence to such a narrow range of experience as ours within the vast hierarchy from quantum events to a unified cosmos simply because it is so obviously and conveniently observable in us?
Also, why would such a cosmic evolutionary process not eventually have as a natural consequence a local reflection of its own axiomatic nature as self-referent (recursively operating) intelligence? Such a Supreme and Conscious Intelligence at the root of existence is axiomatic in this perspective, and so relieves us of any need for proof, since axioms are by definition not provable. In fact, it is inevitable that any rational system have axiomatic assumptions at its roots, so requiring such proof is irrational.
