Poor “Mother Earth.” She just can’t seem to win. One day, she is a vibrant, living, growing, healing, interacting organism—as depicted in the famous “Gaia” hypothesis that has been so ardently defended by the distinguished microbiologist of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Lynn Margulis (one of the late Carl Sagan’s three wives) in her book, Slanted Truths (1997, pp. 145-261). The next day, Mother Earth is a “freak.”
At least that’s what science writer Hazel Muir called the Earth in an article in the March 29, 2003 issue of New Scientist titled “Earth Was a Freak.” In her discussion of our home planet, Ms. Muir discussed the research efforts of Thomas Clarke, an applied mathematician at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who has reached a conclusion that Muir referred to as “bad news for people hunting extraterrestrials” (177[2388]:24, emp. in orig.). From the evidence that Clarke has put together, it appears that “the cozy, rocky planets that are essential for supporting life might be rare, cosmological freaks.” And that, of course, would include Earth, as Muir went on to explain when in her one-page article when she wrote: “The only reason we are here is because a nearby star happened to explode next to our young Sun just as the Solar System was forming.”
What does a star exploding have to do with the Earth being a freak? Clarke and Muir went on to explain. It seems that astronomers believe that the planets and moons of our solar system formed in a “swirling disk of gas and dust” near the Sun. In the outer regions, “cold, slushy gases condensed into the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And in the inner regions, dusty particles melted and stuck together, forming hot blobs of rock that cooled and merged to make Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.”
All of this sounds quite convenient—and is intended to be convincing, of course. The problem is, as Muir noted: “It is not clear why the rock melted—the Sun then was not much hotter than it is now.” But, fear not. Help is on the way. In order to ensure that the “dusty particles” were able to “melt and stick together,” Clarke and colleagues have suggested that “extra heat” might just have been generated at exactly the right moment—by “radioactive aluminum-26 that was sprayed out of a star that exploded up to 50 light-years away when the planets were forming.” And, as Clarke’s research showed, “without the heat from the aluminum, the Earth would not have formed.”
A reasonable question would seem to be: What are the chances of this coming about at “just the right time” through random processes? According to Muir,
the chance of a star exploding at just the right time and place is very much against the odds. Stars only explode three or four times a century in our Galaxy. Clarke estimates that the probability of a supernova happening within 50 light-years of any new solar system that is busy forming planets is only about 1 in 100. “So only a small fraction of planetary systems would be expected to have terrestrial planets,” says Clarke.
Could a planet form that might allow life to develop if this “radioactive aluminum-26” scenario didn’t pan out? Not likely, says Clarke, who concedes that
a small, close-in planet like Mercury could form without being warmed by radioactive aluminum, as it could be near enough to its star for the rock to melt. But such planets would probably remain far too hot for life to thrive. Farther out, it would only be possible to form asteroids and icy gas giants.
Muir thus opined: “NASA and the European Space Agency have plans for ambitious missions to find Earth-sized planets, but if Clarke is right, they may not find what they are looking for.”
No kidding. In their more outspoken moments, evolutionists candidly admit as much. As long ago as 1980, Michael Rowan-Robinson of the University of London observed: “It is an act of faith, based on rather shaky probabilistic arguments, to say that other planets like Earth exist in the Universe” (p. 325, emp. added). Furthermore, quite frequently the claims being made are blatantly contradictory. Consider as proof of that statement the following. G.E. Tauber, in his work, Man’s View of the Universe, suggested that there are “about a billion possible candidates in the galaxy alone” where intelligent life could exist (1979, p. 339, emp. added). That is one billion planets—just in our own Milky Way galaxy! Yet listen to the estimate offered by the late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle:
Of the two hundred billion or so stars in our galaxy, about eighty percent fail to met the conditions discussed above as being necessary for life. The remaining twenty percent are not in multiple star systems and have masses in the appropriate range, three-quarters to one-and-a-half-times the mass of the Sun. The grand total of planetary systems in the galaxy capable of supporting life is therefore close to forty billion (1978, p. 145, emp. added).
Notice that these two men are both discussing exactly the same thing—potentially habitable planets in the same galaxy (the Milky Way). Yet one places the number at one billion, while the other sets it at forty billion. And their books were published within one year of each other! [Mark Twain, by all accounts, was correct when he observed in Life on the Mississippi: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such a wholesale return of conjecture for such a trifling investment of facts” (1883, p. 156).]
However, if you think the difference between the figures offered up by Tauber and Hoyle is staggering, take the time to stop and compare them to the tiny numbers suggested by Thomas Clarke (as reported in the article under review here). As Clarke himself commented: “It’s kind of a dismal conclusion.” “Dismal” is a mild understatement. How could anyone possibly be expected to accept as credible, figures that are as vastly different as these? And how could anyone possibly come to the conclusion that, with life-sustaining planets like the Earth being “freaks,” life actually exists elsewhere?
The simple fact is, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for intelligent life on other planets. Evolutionists have little choice but to admit this fact, as the following information clearly indicates. [Observe how the dates on the quotations range from three decades ago to the present, while the message remains staggeringly consistent.]
1. Ervin Laszlo, in his book, Evolution: The Grand Synthesis, observed: “The search for life, especially intelligent life, outside the confines of our home planet has always fascinated poets and scientists; in recent years it has motivated major research efforts. Alas, these efforts have not brought positive results” (1970, p. 122, emp. added).
2. Theodosius Dobzhansky and his co-authors, in their text, Evolution, stated: “The subject of extraterrestrial life, exobiology, is a curious field of science, since its subject matter has never been observed and may not exist” (1977, p. 366, emp. added).
3. Hubert P. Yockey, writing in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, remarked:
Faith in the infallible and comprehensive doctrines of dialectic materialism plays a crucial role in origin of life scenarios, and especially in exobiology and its ultimate consequence, the doctrine of advanced extra-terrestrial civilization. That life must exist somewhere in the solar system or “suitable planets elsewhere” is widely and tenaciously believed in spite of lack of evidence, or even abundant evidence to the contrary (1981, 91:27, emp. added).
4. The late Isaac Asimov, in reviewing several books for Science Digest, offered his comments on one by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan (Intelligent Life in the Universe). In his review, Dr. Asimov said: “There are so many books on extraterrestrial life (I have written one myself) that they would almost seem to be a cottage industry. This is in a way surprising, since we have absolutely no evidence that any such phenomenon as life on other worlds exists” (1982, p. 36, parenthetical item in orig., emp. added). When Dr. Asimov observed that we have “absolutely no evidence” of extraterrestrial life, his statement, and the conclusion to be drawn from it, hardly could be any plainer.
5. In an article, “Is Anybody Out There?,” for a special edition of Time magazine, Dennis Overbye asked:
And what if, after a millennium of listening and looking, there is only silence—what if we still seem alone? If interstellar migration is as easy and inevitable as Finney and Jones have outlined, and if the galaxy, 10 billion years old, is populated by other advanced races, critics of SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—BT] argue, ETs should have come calling by now. There is no scientific evidence that they have, and the lack of it has led some scientists to argue that there is no life out there at all (1992, pp. 79-80, emp. added; references to Finney and Jones are to Ben Finney, physicist at the Los Alamos, New Mexico National Laboratory, and Eric Jones, anthropologist of the University of Hawaii).
6. Robert Jastrow, the founder and former director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, and the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, was asked to review the 1996 book, The Biological Universe, by Steven J. Dick. In his review, Dr. Jastrow wrote:
All these numbers are so small that, even when multiplied by the vast number of planets probably present in the universe, they force us to conclude that the Earth must be the only planet bearing life (1997, pp. 62-63, emp. added).
7. The same year that Dick’s book was published, Robert Naeye wrote an article for Astronomy magazine titled “OK, Where Are They?,” in which he commented:
If one chooses to shun speculation and stick solely with observations, one can ask the same question that Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi put forth in 1950: If the Galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, where are they? The sobering reality is that there is no observational evidence whatsoever for the existence of other intelligent beings anywhere in the universe (1996, 24:42-43, emp. added).
8. A year later, Seth Shostak penned an article for Astronomy magazine, “When E.T. Calls Us,” in which he discussed the results (or lack thereof) of the SETI program.
This is Project Phoenix, the most comprehensive search ever undertaken for intelligent company among the stars. Run by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, it is the privately funded descendant of a former NASA program. Here, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s 140-foot telescope in Green Bank, Project Phoenix scientists are systematically scrutinizing a thousand nearby sun-like stars for the faint signal that would betray intelligent habitation. So far, they have found nothing—not a single, extraterrestrial peep (1997, 24:37, emp. added).
9. Then, in his 2001 book, The Borderlands of Science, Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, wrote: “In three decades [Carl] Sagan changed the theory [of the existence of extraterrestrial life—BT] from heresy to orthodoxy, even though there still exists not one iota of concrete evidence of any life, simple or complex, intelligent or not, beyond Earth” (p. 217, emp. added).
For evolutionists, these represent sad goings-on. As Clarke himself concluded: “It’s a bit depressing to think that Earth-like planets are too special” (emp. added).
Did he say “too special”? How appropriate, seeing that the entire Universe is indeed fine-tuned in such a way as to make it impossible to suggest logically that the sublime order it exhibits is merely a result of the mind-numbing chaos associated with the so-called Big Bang Theory. Nor is it possible to suggest logically that such a scenario could have provided a life-sustaining planet like the Earth, whether as a “freak” or not. In their book, On the Moral Nature of the Universe, Nancey Murphy and George Ellis noted:
The symmetries and delicate balances we observe in the universe require an extraordinary coherence of conditions and cooperation of laws and effects, suggesting that in some sense they have been purposely designed. That is, they give evidence of intention, realized both in the setting of the laws of physics and in the choice of boundary conditions for the universe (1996, p. 57, emp. added).
The idea that the Earth is “too special,” and that the Universe and its laws have been “purposely designed,” has surfaced much more frequently over the past two decades. For example, Hoyle wrote:
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question (1982, 20:16, emp. added).
In his book, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature, Australian astrophysicist Paul Davies made this amazing statement:
If nature is so “clever” as to exploit mechanisms that amaze us with their ingenuity, is that not persuasive evidence for the existence of intelligent design behind the universe? If the world’s finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance? (1984, pp. 235-236, emp. added).
Four years later, in his text, The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe, Davies went even further when he wrote: “There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all.... It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe…. The impression of design is overwhelming” (1988, p. 203, emp. added). Another four years later, in 1992, Davies authored The Mind of God, in which he remarked:
I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama.… Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here (1992, p. 232, emp. added).
That statement, “We are truly meant to be here,” was the type of sentiment expressed by two scientists, Frank Tipler and John Barrow, in their 1986 book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which discussed the possibility that the Universe seems to have been “tailor-made” for man. Eight years after that book was published, Dr. Tipler wrote The Physics of Immortality, in which he professed:
When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics (1994, Preface).
In 1995, NASA astronomer John O’Keefe stated in an interview:
We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.... If the Universe had not been made with the most ex-acting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in (as quoted in Heeren, 1995, p. 200).
Then, in 1998—thirteen years after he published his 1985 book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis—evolutionist Michael Denton shocked everyone (especially his evolutionist colleagues!) when he authored Nature’s Destiny, and admitted:
Whether one accepts or rejects the design hypothesis... there is no avoiding the conclusion that the world looks as if it has been tailored for life; it appears to have been designed. All reality appears to be a vast, coherent, teleological whole with life and mankind as its purpose and goal” (p. 387, emp. in orig.).
Michael J. Murray, in a discussion of the Big Bang inflationary model, discussed the idea of the origin of the Universe and the complexity that would be required to pull off such an event.
…[I]n all current worked-out proposals for what this “universe generator” could be—such as the oscillating big bang and the vacuum fluctuation models explained above—the “generator” itself is governed by a complex set of physical laws that allow it to produce the universes. It stands to reason, therefore, that if these laws were slightly different the generator probably would not be able to produce any universes that could sustain life. After all, even my bread machine has to be made just right to work properly, and it only produces loaves of bread, not universes!
…[T]he universe generator must not only select the parameters of physics at random, but must actually randomly create or select the very laws of physics themselves. This makes this hypothesis seem even more far-fetched since it is difficult to see what possible physical mechanism could select or create such laws. The reason the “many-universes generator” must randomly select the laws of physics is that, just as the right values for the parameters of physics are needed for life to occur, the right set of laws is also needed. If, for instance, certain laws of physics were missing, life would be impossible. For example, without the law of inertia, which guarantees that particles do not shoot off at high speeds, life would probably not be possible. Another example is the law of gravity; if masses did not attract each other, there would be no planets or stars, and once again it seems that life would be impossible (1999, pp. 61-62).
Hoyle addressed the fine-tuning of the nuclear resonances responsible for the oxygen and carbon synthesis in stars when he observed:
I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not, then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents (1959, emp. added).
And so, when we (to use Hoyle’s words) “examine the evidence,” what do we find? Murray answered:
Almost everything about the basic structure of the universe—for example, the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial distribution of matter and energy—is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur…. Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the “fine-tuning of the cosmos” (1999, p. 48, emp. added).
Indeed they do. And what those scientists witness is, incontrovertibly, “fine-tuning” to a remarkable degree. The Earth, far from being a “freak,” is, as Clarke candidly admitted, “too special.” Yes, it is—just as it was designed to be.
REFERENCES
Asimov, Isaac (1982), “Book Reviews,” Science Digest, 90[3]:36, March. The book by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe, was published by Holden-Day, New York, 1966.
Barrow, John D. and Frank Tipler (1986), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).
Davies, Paul (1984), Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster).
Davies, Paul (1988), The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster).
Davies, Paul (1992), The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, New York).
Denton, Michael (1998), Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster).
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, F.J. Ayala, G.L. Stebbins, and J.W. Valentine (1977), Evolution (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman).
Heeren, Fred (1995), Show Me God (Wheeling, IL: Searchlight Publications).
Hoyle, Fred (1959), Religion and the Scientists, as quoted in John Barrow and Frank Tipler (1986, p. 22), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).
Hoyle, Fred (1978), Lifecloud (New York: Harper & Row).
Hoyle, Fred (1982), “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20:1-35.
Jastrow, Robert (1997), “What are the Chances for Life?,” [review of The Biological Universe, by Steven J. Dick (London, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 578 pp.)], Sky and Telescope, June.
Laszlo, Ervin (1987), Evolution: The Grand Synthesis (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publishing).
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan (1997), Slanted Truths (New York: Springer-Verlag).
Muir, Hazel (2003), “Earth Was a Freak,” New Scientist, 177[2388]:24, March 29.
Murphy, Nancey and George F.R. Ellis (1996), On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress).
Murray, Michael J. (1999), Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
Naeye, Robert (1996), “OK, Where Are They?,” Astronomy, 24:42-43, July.
Overbye, Dennis (1992), “Is Anybody Out There?,” Time [special issue], Fall.
Rowan-Robinson, Michael (1980), New Scientist, January 31.
Shermer, Michael (2001), The Borderlands of Science (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).
Shostak, Seth (1997), “When E.T. Calls Us,” Astronomy, 25:37, September.
Tauber, G.E. (1979), Man’s View of the Universe (New York: Crown).
Tipler, Frank (1994), The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday).
Twain, Mark (1883), Life on the Mississippi (Boston, MA: J.R. Osgood).
Yockey, Hubert P. (1981), “Self-organization Origin-of-Life Scenarios and Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 91:13-31.
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