This is where God dies

My, oh my! Kudos to Eric Bahrt’s letter of cognitive dissonance. I can show that even the cherries he picks are inedible.
Bahrt earlier accused me of being “silly” in ascribing intelligence to individual ants when I’d written just the opposite. He didn’t grasp my point that ants’ nests show certain intelligence in their social organisation, opening the possibility that our so-called intelligent brains work the same way. 
To support the possibility that intelligence is automatically present when organisms are sufficiently complex, I gave the example of self-learning AI machines that are able to pass the Turing test and are thus indistinguishable from humans.
However this doesn’t explain where human intelligence came from. Here I referred to Krauss’ “A Universe from Nothing”, which shows that matter can be created from nothing. Physics explain how the stars and planets were formed from particles. The world we live in is utterly complex in its flora and fauna. No wonder primitive humans invented God to explain the world. But, since Darwin, we have a perfect tool for understanding the world and no longer need to evoke a god. Such a complex world is perfectly capable of having intelligence without the interference of a god. Add to this the advances in genetics, which opens another way of creating intelligence without God.
Bahrt doesn’t help his case when he calls the showing of possibilities other than God as origins of human intelligence “pseudo-intellectual” and “pseudo-scientific”, since these adjectives say nothing about the validity of the concepts, only his contempt for the writer. 
Bahrt wrote, “How can unconscious matter evolve into intelligence without human intervention?” Astonishing! He confirms my suggestion that humans can create intelligence without “God’s help” – something he always denied vehemently! If he meant to add “without God’s intervention”, he undermines his agnosticism. If God is needed, he must exist, and no doubt is possible.
Your accusation that I, as an atheist, am as bad as the worst religious fanatic is not correct. Atheists, beyond mere politics, have never committed heinous atrocities because they don’t believe in God. And a “fanatic”? I allow all people their opinions, absurd or not. I only refute opinions on the basis of argument, a quality you have to deny to fanatics. There is overwhelming evidence that no God exists. That Bahrt believes otherwise is his right, but to call a letter opposing his belief “despicable” is beyond me and says enough about his state of mind.
Egon