Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been “discovered.” In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light output measured by their instruments to infer the diameter of a planet transiting in front of its star. And what they’ve discovered is there are thousands of these planets. In fact, they seem ubiquitous. Everywhere we look we find them.
And this has convinced an awful lot of people that life must be ubiquitous in the universe too. And that intelligent life must be common too. This would go a long way to encouraging the crowd who believe that human beings are nothing special and any belief in the divine origin of the human race is completely unfounded. The story goes we’re just some monkeys that got a little smarter than the other monkeys and have become a blight on the face of “Gaia.”
I have to say, I completely disagree. I look at the Earth and compare it to the other planets in our solar system and I’m struck by how many factors conspire to make Earth a paradise while leaving all of the other planets different flavors of hell. Everything from the effect of our large satellite, to the strength of the magnetic field to the balance between elements and compounds that make up the oceans and atmosphere, to the exact orbit of Earth around the Sun. And that’s not to mention the remarkable way terrestrial life has shaped the environment in remarkable ways. Plant life has increased the oxygen content of the atmosphere and life has changed the environment in innumerable ways.
And then we have the fossil record demonstrating the prodigious changes that have gone on for billions of years to produce the current flora and fauna of this remarkable world. From the one-celled origins of life to the present-day complexity of creatures as varied as hummingbirds and blue whales; birds of paradise and Siberian tigers; dragonflies and giant pandas. And us.
I’m sorry, I cannot believe that all this is just the random result of fermions and bosons rattling around the aftermath of the “big bang.” To quote the immortal words of Vizzini, “Inconceivable.” And I know he was dead wrong every time he said it but that is my rock bottom intuition. All of this is purposeful. All of this was directed. We are here because life has meaning and human life is the soul behind the giant mechanism. We are the witness and the object for which the whole dizzying array was created.
We are the guests of honor in a parade that stretches out to the detectable limits of the universe and back and forth in time from, “Let there be light” to the end of “Revelations.” We’re here to make sense out of the wonders of creation and to use them to figure out the full potentialities of the human mind and soul.
And I don’t believe for a minute that we’ll destroy ourselves utterly. History has shown just how stupid and cruel we can be. Humans can be more vicious than any predator. There are no depths we can’t sink to. But that is lowest part of our nature. We have not yet begun to figure ourselves out. We’re still ignorant children. But we will grow up and we will grow out of our ignorance. And then we will become what we are supposed to be. God’s children.
Agreed. I never bought the “Million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years would recreate the total works of Shakespeare. The same argument claims that humanity is just a result of billions of years of randomness. I don’t buy it. I am a scientist. If you understand everything that goes into the human eye – just the eye, forget the brain, the heart the digestive system, only consider the eye – and understand how complicated that organ is. I cannot conceive of a series of random accidents that would lead to the human eye. So I have to… Read more »
As you get older you realize how little we understand about reality. And that’s when it becomes easier to see that “proving” the existence of God just takes Occam’s Razor; the simplest explanation.