The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.
Fred HoyleRead
A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the complexity of the universe indicates an intelligent design rather than random forces.
Fred Hoyle argues that the intricate and precisely balanced laws of physics, chemistry, and biology imply the existence of a guiding intelligence rather than chance alone. He feels the overwhelming evidence from scientific observations strongly supports the idea that nature operates under an intelligent hand, challenging notions of randomness in natural processes.
In practice
During a lecture on the origins of the universe, one might say, 'As Fred Hoyle noted, the complexity of our existence points towards an intelligent design.'
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.
Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
So, influenced by these advisors and this hope, I have at length allowed my friends to publish the work, as they had long besought me to do.
In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.
The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.
There are many who would much prefer that the word 'climate' never be mentioned and that the issue be eliminated from our national conversation.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
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