Livingstone's Closing Statement

So I am supposed to conclude this entire debate with my closing statement. I had set out to prove that intelligent design is necessary to account for life on earth. Well, obviously this is an impossible thing to do if there is no rigid definition of what entails ‘necessary.’ It is frankly impossible to prove that anything is absolutely necessary. Would Theophage say that intelligence is necessary for the construction of a piece of high-quality literature? Perhaps, but there would be no way to prove that it is absolutely necessary. Simulations might be run to determine if random processes could produce a piece of literature, yet these simulations could not rebut the notion that maybe, just maybe, somehow, something extremely lucky happened and this hypothetical literature was produced by chance processes. There is always the possibility that something incredibly lucky happened, which would render any attempt to prove intelligence absolutely necessary null and void.

This is why I regret that no attempt to define what we mean by ‘necessary’ was made by any of the debating parties.

On the other hand, I am satisfied with my performance on demonstrating that intelligence is a more adequate explanation for certain biochemical systems than mindless processes.

Ultimately, I agree with Theophage that we have all won this debate (i.e. we have both lost the debate from a pessimist’s point of view).

So I wish my opponent good luck in any of the things he’s going to be doing, and I wish the audience luck.

Livingstone Morford