Creation?
Can we not and should we not imagine that somewhere out in all that infinity of intelligence at least one creative intelligence finally hits upon a formula for creation. Perhaps some genie figured out how to anthropically engineer a newly emerging universe so as to optimize its physical parameters for life, and, indeed, for other intelligence. This engineering scenario does not have to be performed by a genie, it could just have been a normally cooperating group of advanced civilizations. Or perhaps some other genie simply 'falls asleep' and more or less inadvertently dreams up a whole world, rather like the Buddha under the Bo tree. Or perhaps there is a band of inter-cosmic computer hackers who are particularly adept at the programming of virtual worlds and artificial intelligence.
Here is the point. We have pretty darn good evidence that life is possible. Now if there is not a creator to begin with, the power of creation is almost certain to emerge somewhere and somewhen, and when it does there is a very powerful, unstoppable(?) bootstrap mechanism in place. If life is spontaneously possible, then it seems natural to presume that even more life is deliberately possible.
Unless there is a strict law against creation (and who would enforce it?), then creation is most likely to be the predominant source of all life. That would mean that the average critter is pretty darn likely to actually be a creature, owing its ultimate existence to the more or less deliberate acts of some form of creative intelligence.
Where does that leave us? From whence did we come? Don't we have sufficient evidence to prove that our particular world was a purely accidental occurrence? All I am saying at this point is that with all the potential and actual intelligence that may exist in an infinity of cosmoses, we ought to consider the possibility that we may be more intimately networked into that creative potential than one might want to suppose from the relatively naive point of view that characterizes the mindset of the average materialistic scientist. Just a thought.
5/19/02