Posted on 06/10/2005 8:04:42 PM PDT by CHARLITE
For a few moments there, “Intelligent Design” seemed to be making headway.
Two weeks ago, the Smithsonian announced it would screen the movie, “The Privileged Planet,” produced by the Discovery Institute, at the National Museum of History on June 23rd. The outcry in the New York Times and The Washington Post was immediate. The Smithsonian was caving to religious fundamentalists. “While `The Privileged Planet’ is an extremely sophisticated religious film, it is a religious film nevertheless,” pronounced The Post in an editorial entitled “Dissing Darwin.”
Within a week, the Smithsonian had yielded to liberal opinion. It cancelled its “co-sponsorship” of the event and gave back Discovery’s $16,000 contribution – although the movie will still be shown on schedule. It’s a fitting resolution. Thanks to the Times and Post, Discovery will now have an extra $16,000 with which to spread its heresies.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I did read the excerpt from the book, The Privileged Planet, in the March 2004 issue of The American Spectator. I don’t know whether I’d call authors Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards’ argument “religious.” “Creepy” would seem a better term.
Some of “Privileged Planet” is legitimate science. Gonzalez and Richards are addressing the question of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. We know there are billions of galaxies, each of them containing somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 stars. (The Spectator made a telling typographical error when it said there are “1022 visible stars.” They meant to say “1022.”) With astronomers now finding that planets are fairly common around nearby stars, the odds that there is life out there somewhere seem reasonably good.
Not so fast, say Gonzalez and Richards. Instead they approach the question from a different angle. There may be billions and billions of stars with billions of planets circling around them, but how many of these planets are right in the earth’s sweet spot – the “temperate orbit” where temperatures range only between 0o and 100o so that life can survive? How many have a liquid ocean, rather than icebergs or infernos? How many have a moon that massages the oceans so they circulate nutrients and even (so G&R claim) stabilize the parent planet in its orbit? How many suns are in the mid-range of their galaxy, where they aren’t overwhelmed by cosmic radiation or starved for lack of it?
Fair enough. These are legitimate arguments that illustrate the earth’s very unique position in relation to the solar system and the galaxy.
But then Gonzalez and Richards start talking about other strange “coincidences.” How many planets have a clear atmosphere so they can look out on the stars? they ask. How many have a moon that is exactly the size of the sun in its sky? Without that, say Gonzalez and Richards, we wouldn’t be able to see a perfect solar eclipse. “Newton was able to examine the spectrum of sunlight because of the solar eclipse,” they argue. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was only proved by observing the bending of starlight during a solar eclipse.”
All this leads them to one conclusion. Not only is our planet “designed” for life, it is also “designed” with a “purpose”—to breed a species just like ourselves capable of looking out on the rest of the universe and discovering its secrets.
Now wait a minute. Are you trying to argue that not only did God put us here on earth but also arranged the size of the sun and the moon so that Einstein’s theory of relativity could be verified? This seems a little far-fetched to me. I don’t think even firm believers in Hinduism, Christianity, or any other religion who would go quite that far.
Instead of arguing that everything on earth has been “designed” for some mysterious “purpose,” I think it’s much more instructive to look at some of God’s little errors. The one that has always struck me is the density of ice.
One thing we learn right away in elementary physics is that gas is the least dense state of matter, liquids are in the middle, and solids are the densest. That’s because the molecules are loosely associated in gases, adhere together somewhat in liquids, and are tightly bound together in solids.
There is one glaring exception, however—ice. Unlike any other element or compound, H2O is lighter as a solid—ice—it is as a liquid—water. No other substance has this property. Is this a big deal? It certainly is. It just so happens that it made the evolution of life possible.
If ice were heavier than water, it would sink to the bottom in a lake or shallow sea. Then, more water would freeze on the surface and sink again and soon the whole body of water would be frozen solid from top to bottom. Anything living in that lake or shallow sea would die. Since most life originated in water, living forms never could have survived.
Instead, ice floats. Why? There doesn’t seem to be any real explanation. I’ve always thought it was evidence that God was willing to admit His mistakes and bend the rules when it counted. When He was finished designing the fundaments of the universe – gases, liquids, and solids – He said, “Oh, darn, I forgot. This isn’t going to work.” So, He made that one exception. All solids shall be denser than their liquids except water. That way life could evolve.
Is there a better explanation? The Darwinian “anthropogenic” view now popular in scientific circles, would say, “Of course ice has to be lighter than water. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Therefore, Q.E.D.” At the other end of the room, the “Privileged Planet” people would say, “It has to be more than coincidence. Things like that don’t just happen. It’s proof of Intelligent Design.”
Personally, I prefer the explanation offered in the Book of Job. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The ways of God are still more mysterious than any of us can comprehend.
NOTE: You’ll notice I haven’t even gotten around to mentioning Charles Darwin, who is supposed to be the target of “Intelligent Design” theory. Next week I’ll talk about whether complexity theory supports ID—as Dan Peterson argues in this month’s American Spectator— or whether it indicates something different.
William Tucker is a contributing writer for TAE Online.
I've never heard that viewpoint expressed. If anything, the fact that life has occurred on earth indicates that it's quite possible to have occurred elsewhere.
The idea that countless lifetimes of light years of travel away exists a separate body of life adds exponentially to the odds against evolution.
Why? This doesn't follow at all.
You might want to read the story about the ocean explorations of the Chinese under the third and fourth Ming emperors. China only had to walk through an open door and they'd have dominated the world for the next five centuries, and they walked away from it. We're facing a similar door.
What's the scale on that picture you claim is a village?
Good metaphor. The door is always open, just knock. Why would one knock on an open door?
Here is where they move definitively from posing a legitimate argument into special pleading, if not out-and-out moonbattery in the first degree.
First of all, an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere (which is dictated by basic chemistry and element abundance on a planet with life as we know it) is going to be generally clear.
Second, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that having a moon the same size as the sun in the sky is in any way essential, even if one accepts the notion that a large moon provides necessary axial stabilization. (I'm not convinced that life wouldn't adapt just fine to axial instability -- it adapts to some pretty extreme climates on Earth, after all.)
Third, the statement that a solar eclipse is needed to study the spectrum of sunlight is just plain nonsensical. I've seen plenty of rainbows, both natural and artificial, with nary an eclipse in sight.
Obviously, water ice is less dense than liquid water on any planet (unless the local pressure level is so high that water solidifies into a denser allotrope, which isn't the case in any environment where life as we know it is to be expected anyway). Thus, the argument is completely irrelevant to "privileged planet" twaddle.
The moon is just rocks, which I find non-interesting. Mars may be the original home of the human race, and I definitely want the US to be the first to get inside those pyramids and read whatever sort of literature one might find there.
If nothing else, whoever built those things had bulldozer technology which was better than ours. The first nation to get there will probably dominate the bulldozer market for the next 1000 years.
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