As we survey all the
evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or,
rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without
intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a
Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the
cosmos for our benefit? Astronomer
George Greenstein
Astronomy leads us to
a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very
delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit
life, and one which has an underlying (one might say “supernatural”) plan. Nobel laureate Arno Penzias
There’s nothing unusual about Earth. It’s an average,
unassuming that’s spinning mindlessly around an unremarkable star in a
run-of-the-mill galaxy—“a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” as
the late Carl Sagan put it. The fact
that life flourishes on our planet isn’t exceptional. Creatures of all kinds
undoubtedly abound, we’re told, in countless locations among the ten trillion
billion stars in the universe. Some scientists have estimated there are up to
ten trillion advanced civilizations. Sagan put the number at one million for
our Milky Way galaxy alone. After all, the forces of nature are so automatic
that life is sure to have evolved wherever water exists. That’s why whenever
scientists raise new speculation about liquid water being present on another
celestial body—the underground worlds of Jupiter’s frozen moons Europa and
Ganymede are currently the most fashionable examples—then the automatic
assumption is that living organisms must necessarily and inexorably follow. If
life can emerge from nonlife so quickly and efficiently on a planet as
undistinguished as ours, they reason, then why not throughout the universe’s
hundreds of billions of galaxies? To them, life is like a soup mix: just add
water!
“The universe that we observe,” said Oxford’s Richard
Dawkins, “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless
indifference.”
Earth’s location, its size, its composition, its structure,
its atmosphere, its temperature, its internal dynamics, and its many intricate
cycles that are essential to life—the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the
nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, the sulfur cycle, the calcium cycle, the
sodium cycle, and so on—testify to the degree to which our planet is
exquisitely and precariously balanced.
if you can just find a
place anywhere in the universe where water stays liquid for a long enough
period of time, then life will develop, just as it did on Earth,”
“It’s true that in
order to have life you need water—which is the universal solvent—for reactions
to take place, as well as carbon, which serves as the core atom of the information-carrying
structural molecules of life. But you also need a lot more. Humans require
twenty-six essential elements; a bacterium about sixteen. Intermediate life
forms are between those two numbers. The problem is that not just any planetary
body will be the source of all those chemical ingredients in the necessary
forms and amounts.”
Some science fiction writers have managed to speculate about
extra-terrestrial life that’s built in a radically different form—for instance,
creatures based on silicon instead of carbon.
That just won’t work, Chemistry is one of the better
understood areas of science. We know that you just can’t get certain atoms to
stick together in sufficient number and complexity to give you large molecules
like carbon can. You can’t get around it. And you just can’t get other types of
liquids to dissolve as many different kinds of chemicals as you can with water.
There’s something like half a dozen different properties of both water and
carbon that are optimal for life. Nothing else comes close. Silicon falls far
short of carbon.
Some people see life as being easy to create. They think it’s enough
merely to have liquid water, because they see life as an epiphenomenon—just a
piece of slime mold growing on an inert piece of granite. Actually, the Earth’s
geology and biology interact very tightly with each other. You can’t think of
life as being independent of the geophysical and meteorological processes of
the planet. They interact in a very intimate way. So you need not only the
right chemicals for life but also a planetary environment that’s tuned to life.
Have an Intelligent Faith!!
-Nelis
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