RAY KURZWEIL: The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That's one role of intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so that we can develop models of how we got here.

Then, of course, we can run those models and project what might happen in the future. Even if it's a little more difficult to test the future theories, we can at least deduce, or induce, that certain phenomena that we see today are evidence of times past, such as radiation from billions of years ago. We can't really test what will happen billions or trillions of years from now quite as directly, but this line of inquiry is legitimate, in terms of understanding the past and the derivation of the universe. As we heard today, the question of the origin of the universe is certainly not resolved. There are competing theories, and at several times we've had theories that have broken down, once we acquired more precise evidence.

At the same time, however, we don't hear discussion about the role of intelligence in the future. According to common wisdom, intelligence is irrelevant to cosmological thinking. It is just a bit of froth dancing in and out of the crevices of the universe, and has no effect on our ultimate cosmological destiny. That's not my view. The universe has been set up exquisitely enough to have intelligence. There are intelligent entities like ourselves that can contemplate the universe and develop models about it, which is interesting. Intelligence is, in fact, a powerful force and we can see that its power is going to grow not linearly but exponentially, and will ultimately be powerful enough to change the destiny of the universe.

Source, and rest of article