How Much Intelligence Does it Take?

I, like many people love automobiles. They are amazing! They provide the ability to get so many different places so quickly and in comfort. And many look so good. There are so many awesome designs, engines with great horsepower, climate controlled, with sound systems that marvel, technology to the max. They are designed with style that is not only attractive but engineered with efficiency in mind.

I love the new Tesla S! It is an amazing car. No engine, no transmission, no need for gasoline, a full 17 inch computer screen to handle the functions of your automobile. And even with no engine or transmission it is still a car with great acceleration, 0-60mph in just over 4 seconds. It had to require a different thought process, a paradigm shift to believe you could create an automobile that is fast as most any sports car on the market and not have an engine. It had to have challenged the intelligent automotive minds of today to think and design such an automobile.

2012-tesla-model-s_100365754_m

WHERE’S THE ENGINE?

TESLA S Trunk

Then look at the smart phones of today. Small, with so much technology and apps it staggers the imagination. These people who design these things are intelligent, I mean really really smart.

To have the vision to think these concepts in the mind and the smarts to create these technologies from mind to reality took some major intelligence. Likewise I cannot imagine that to create our world it took any less intelligence or any less design. None of us will deny the fact that the products we live our lives with today, from something as simple as a fork and spoon, to complexity of the automobile or smart phone didn’t happen by accident. Someone had to think and design the fork and spoon just as they had to have the intelligence to think and create the automobile and smart phone.  How can we possibly think that complexity of the earth, with its water, oxygen, plants, animals, insects, humans, etc. all of which play an integral role in each other’s existence, happened without that same intelligence or with any sense of design that our circle of life and ecosystem would all work together.

As a person who studied the sciences we were taught to propose a hypotheses or theory and then prove or disprove it. Many theories that could not be proved were by default considered disproved….until new knowledge became available. Just because we cannot explain something and it is beyond our current level of understanding doesn’t mean it is not possible or didn’t happen. I am not the smartest person in the world, but even the most intelligent minds could not possibly design and create our planet and the life on. I also find it intellectually very hard to believe that like the fork, spoon, automobile and smart phone that they were created by the big bang theory and then evolved into the ordered life systems we know. Many things we are still learning and trying to understand, but how much intelligence would it take to design and create the universe, the planet, all living things and the human race? Could we propose that perhaps a mind much greater than a single human mind, or perhaps even greater than the mind of all of our experts combined?

So……… as an intelligent person reading this blog I want to challenge you to watch this 38 minute video. Listen intently to the questions being asked and the responses to those questions. Ask yourself some of those same questions.

Now think about this. How much time and energy did most of us spend researching our last automobile to make sure it was safe or fuel efficient? An automobile that we might keep for 3-5 years? Would it be worth spending 38 minutes watching this video and then do some research to make a decision where you and your children may spend eternity? It might require a Paradigm Shift, but be smart and do your homework. One thing for sure, the cost is greater and you will be there longer than you will keep your car.

7 thoughts on “How Much Intelligence Does it Take?

  1. ” I also find it intellectually very hard to believe that like the fork, spoon, automobile and smart phone that they were created by the big bang theory and then evolved into the ordered life systems we know.”

    As none of those items can reproduce naturally, you’d be right to not believe that.

    The Big Bang Theory has very little to do with Evolution, however.

    Watched the badly edited movie. Not at all convinced by Comfort.

  2. Your arguments are well thought out and lucid and make sense. But your conclusions are totally wrong and based on ignorance of natural science. The reason we need science and conscious understanding to build a better car is that we can’t afford to be unbelievably inefficient and we refuse to be as wantonly cruel as nature is. Know how nature builds a faster animal? By the animals copying themselves and varying (so some are faster and some are slower for various random reasons) and then all the slow ones getting ripped apart and eaten for hundreds or thousands of generations and only the variations that produce a desirable result getting passed on. We could design cars this way if we had the resources, build a million cars, make them all a little different in random ways (different materials, contours etc), then take the ones that perform best and make a million viariations of those, rinse and repeat a few thousand times and you have a better car. But that would be insane. That’s how nature does it.

    Don’t think it would work?

    http://boxcar2d.com/

    Watch this simulator run through a few dozen generations and watch them evolve.

    We bred greyhounds (race track dogs) to be extremely streamlined and aerodynamic, even with pointed noses and tear-drop shaped bodies and short fur, perfectly designed for speed. But guess what, we did it before we knew what aerodynamics was. That’s because trial and error, as I said, does not require conscious understanding. We bred the fastest dogs and didn’t breed the slowest ones for x generations. Boom, a newer, better design. Why do you think race track records keep getting beaten after centuries of competition?

    As for the world being perfect for us that is putting the cart before the horse, life adapts to the environment – put a lizard in the arctic and it will die. Put a polar bear in the desert and it will die. The earth isn’t “perfect” for either of them, they are just adapted well to their environment. We live in a world that is supposedly created just for us but we can’t live on about 90% of it’s surface. 70% is ocean and most of the rest is fry desert or frozen wastes. If you think the world is perfect for you sleep outside next winter and throw away your air conditioning unit. Oh and no clothes for you, the world is perfect.

    As for the video it’s a dishonestly edited hack job akin to the ACORN videos (google it). Ask me any supposedly unanswerable question and I will answer it no problem.

    • I appreciate your well thought out response.

      My point is that there has to be intelligence to create a system where the animals can evolve, just as it took intelligence to breed the greyhounds as you described. Limited intelligence as you very wisely suggest because of our limited understanding of aerodynamics at the time. I believe to create life it took infinitely more intelligence, and infinitely more intelligence than we understand. I believe the more we learn the more our conclusion will have to be there was something that created us that did so with more than human intelligence.

      I don’t deny things have evolved, but before you can evolve you have to have something to evolve from, something that was created. In the case of you and I and this amazing planet and universe we live in, it was done so with more wisdom and intelligence than all of us combined.

      • We had absolutely no understanding or even concept of aerodynamics, which was my point. Trial and error does not require intelligence, just a mechanism of selection, and as modern biologists well understand that mechanism need not be conscious. If you want to say that this is intelligent I won’t argue, but that doesn’t mean it’s being controlled by a big brain somewhere in the sky. And if a brain is so complex it needs a designer then who designed the brain that designed our brains? And who designed the brain that designed that brain? And the one that designed that one and so on into infinity? Abiogenesis and natural selection have the benefit of explaining how complexity can arise to begin with, without invoking an even greater complexity.

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