A “super-intellect”?

Sir Fred Hoyle in a mosaic — “Pursuit” (1952) by Boris Anrep, is part of a series of mosaics of the Modern Virtues located in the entrance hall of the National Gallery, in London. It depicts the astronomer and physicist Sir Fred Hoyle as a steeplejack climbing up to the stars. (Wikimedia Commons) Hoyle (1915-2001) was typically an overt atheist, but, as time went by, he appeared to have Doubts.

Would you not say to yourself, in whatever language supercalculating intellects use, “Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be less than 1 part in 10⁴⁰⁰⁰⁰.” Of course you would. . . . I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. [Sir Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (September 1982): 16]