Canter Bridge

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Copernicus, we are told early in this presentation of an earth that is uniquely and improbably endowed to support complex life, thought the impossible.

It is a notion that is gripping many cosmologists, physicists, and the like in our time. Predictably for the advance of human knowledge, any robust questioning of received wisdom provokes defensive and emotional reaction. Students of the intellectual movement called Intelligent Design (its detractors consider it a religious rather than a scientific enterprise) have grown accustomed to disproportionate responses, an observation that is born out by a quick scan of the reviews of this DVD on amazon.com.

Yet the questions raised here are real. They merit a reasonable response, either by way of affirmation, rebuttal, or at the very least the admission that the queries posed here deserve further investigation.

Though this reviewer is sympathetic to the presentation here, one must admit that an overwrought narrative voice (John Rhys-Davies) and a mysterious soundtrack do not advocate the argument before its skeptics. Yet the photographic images surely drop the jaw of the most religious and the most atheistic of viewers in honest astonishment. Perhaps here is modest common ground, waiting to serve all parties as home turf.

After all, as one of the interviewees reminds us, when faced with the uniqueness or not of the solar system we know, ‘either answer is interesting’.

The Privileged Planet argument assumes that the basic laws of physics as we have come to know them are active and presupposable throughout the universe. Once established, this methodological assumption permits inspection of other planets we know something about in order to discern whether the factors that permit life here are detectable there. One must investigate not only the number of other test cases that are out there, but also the presence or active of the life-cultivating factors that make life possible here on earth.

These factors, currently estimated to number about twenty, include:

-liquid water
-a terrestial planet with plate tectonic activity
-an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere
-a large moon that stabilizes the earth’s orbit at a convenient angle
-a circumstellar habitable zone that depends upon a certain kind of star
-shielding from major collisions

The argument is that such a combination of factors is highly unlikely to appear in conjunction anywhere, and certainly more than the one time we know about.

Proponents of Intelligent Design calculate that our planet is ‘rare in the universe’. It is quite another move to venture religious conjectures based upon such rarity. Such a conjecture can be abbreviated as ‘the question of significance’. Here the title of the DVD comes into play. It asserts that our planet is not only ‘rare’, but also fortunate, favored, or ‘privileged’. That is, did a mind arrange this improbable convergence of factors? Is there something more to be detected than a ‘cosmic lottery’?

The Discovery Institute mounts a cumulative and incremental argument that suggests correlations unlikely to occur other than by some intelligent design. Even our ability to observe the universe aligns with the habitable nature of the earth in that both appear to be unique to our solitary planet.

Not only astrophysicists and cosmologists ought to exercise the capacity to admit puzzlement and awe before these questions. Philosophers of science are just as inevitably drawn in, particularly when one considers the discoverability and intelligibility of the universe vis-à-vis observers.

These arguments, placed upon the table in the public arena, do not require a religious answer. However it behooves honest observes to join the question of how the universe as we know it came to be and then to ask whether we can know why?

The postulation of a mind is perhaps not the only plausible answer to these conundra. Yet if such a postulate explains the data more coherently and more economically than any other, what will we do then?

It seems fair to ask.