Conditions are great for life here on earth, now that we have adapted to direct sunlight and oxygen, but what does the scarcity or abundance of extraterrestrial life have to do with the study of terrestrial life? Is it another, it was difficult so “Goddidit” type of thing?
Well, it does have to do with the preconditions for the development of life. It is the basis for any notion of macroevolution. But my point is that non-biologists see evidence of order in the universe that does benefit us, and so the question arises: is there a benefactor behind it all? IAC, our science presupposes a discernible order, of meaningful patterns. It is said that Newton, even as a children, weas enchanted by patterns, and after he acquired the mathematical tools to work with, and sufficient knowledge of the physics and astronomy of the day, was moved to create a system that has served us to this day, much as Euclid’s geometry still does. Kant’s epistomology has infected out thinking, and so we tend to think that we are just projecting our meaning on things, much as discern animal shapes in the clouds, on Madonnas on pie crusts. I don’t necessarily agree with Behe and the rest, but don’t they have the right to suggest that maybe, just maybe Darwin and his followers might be doing a little projecting of their own? For example, we have the capitulation scheme cooked upby Haeckel(?) in the 19th Century, which proposed that the shapes of developing fetuses show all the stages of human evolution, from single-cell to human? Later observers decided that this was a little too clever by half. Scientists are not unlike the rest of us: they leap to conclusions, because they wish things to be just so.