As far as her advice, I guess she means just take a lot of really good drugs.

O.K. I'll be honest with you. I think that's bullshit. I have no idea what the woman is talking about. Maybe a stroke isn't an edifying experience after all. I think I'll try to avoid it.

yeah i know, but it's a stimulating topic all the same.

FWIW, my post was not meant to be relevant to theology or an ultimate designer, just the human problem of knowledge being scattered in many distinct brains.

I know, but everyone at Cafe Hayek presumably accepts that already. I'm trying to stir things up.

It's all the same, man. Just a bunch of chemicals.

It's all chemicals, but that's like saying that information is all bits or music is all noise or literature is all letters, punctuation and spacing or women are all pink on the inside. It's just not a very useful generalization.

Science is fine while speaking scientifically. So is theology, while speaking of faith.

You may subdivide your lexicon this way, but theology is not traditionally limited to articles of faith. Many theological assertions require faith, but theological assertions need not require faith.

"As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return."

That's a traditional, theological assertion.

All you're saying is that the natural process itself is the way the intelligent designer operates.

I'm saying that the Designer's intelligence emerges from natural information processing in the same way that my intelligence emerges from signals coursing through my brain and through the network of other brains with which my brain communicates. This assertion is both scientific and theological.

Maybe the NP gets bored. On one hand NP creates the moon. On the other, NP creates a platypus. It's all the same, man. Just a bunch of chemicals.

Nature creates, and then favors the self sustaining. Generally it does not create the pleasing for it's own sake.
Unless you want to consider yourself part of the natural processes (which you are) and see your actions in creating (or not) a deck as part of nature, just as bees making honey combs are part of nature.

The Natural Process made you, and you're far more complex and useful than a shed in your backyard. Why would the Natural Process bother?

Similarly, my problem with "intelligent design" is not that ID advocates claim "intelligence" in the development of living forms. I agree with them. My problem is that they imagine "intelligence" to be some miraculous holy ghost in the natural machinery rather than an emergent property of natural processes that don't seem very "intelligent" in isolation. Intelligence is the forest, not the trees, and design is a manifestation of intelligence.

Human intelligence similarly emerges from the complex interaction of signals coursing through a complex neural network, as well as information coursing through a larger, social network of these neural networks. The Creator (or Gaia or what have you) is intelligent, but Her intelligence is a manifestation of natural processes rather than an external influence on them, and She certainly doesn't whisper Hebrew in the ear of Moses from a burning bush, not literally anyway. A distinction between information and its material embodiment, between software and hardware, is a meaningful distinction, but the former does not exist independently of the latter.

I don't say that all problems have solutions, but I will say that designers solve problems; however, God is not a central planner, and central planners are not as Godlike as they imagine. That's my theology anyway.