The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [100]
“Second, a perfect solar eclipse in 1919 helped two teams of astronomers confirm the fact that gravity bends light, which was a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That test was only possible during a total solar eclipse, and it led to general acceptance of Einstein’s theory.
“Third, perfect eclipses provided a historical record that has enabled astronomers to calculate the change in the Earth’s rotation over the past several thousand years. This enabled us to put ancient calendars on our modern calendar system, which was very significant.”
Richards, who had been listening intently, spoke up. “What’s mysterious,” he said, “is that the same conditions that give us a habitable planet also make our location so wonderful for scientific measurement and discovery. So we say there’s a correlation between habitability and measurability.
“Not only does the specific configuration of the Earth, sun, and moon allow for perfect eclipses, but that same configuration is also vital to sustaining life on Earth. We’ve already discussed how the size and location of the moon stabilizes our tilt and increases our tides, and how the size of the sun and our distance from it also make life possible here.
“Our main point,” he concluded, “is that there’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. In fact, we believe that the conditions for making scientific discoveries on Earth are so fine-tuned that you would need a great amount of faith to attribute them to mere chance.”
HABITABILITY AND MEASURABILITY
Prompted by the study of perfect solar eclipses, Gonzalez and Richards began to investigate the incredible convergence of habitability and measurability in scores of other settings. They came up with a wide range of examples that merely served to amplify their amazement.
“For example,” said Gonzalez, “not only do we inhabit a location in the Milky Way that’s fortuitously optimal for life, but our location also happens to provide us with the best overall platform for making a diverse range of discoveries for astronomers and cosmologists. Our location away from the galaxy’s center and in the flat plane of the disk provides us with a particularly privileged vantage point for observing both nearby and distant stars.
“We’re also in an excellent position to detect the cosmic background radiation, which is critically important because it helped us realize our universe had a beginning in the Big Bang. The background radiation contains invaluable information about the properties of the universe when it was only about three hundred thousand years old. There’s no other way of getting that data. And if we were elsewhere in the galaxy, our ability to detect it would have been greatly hindered.”
Richards offered a few other illustrations. “The moon stabilizes the Earth’s tilt, which gives us a livable climate—and it also consistently preserves the deep snow deposits in the polar regions. These deposits are a tremendously valuable data recorder for scientists,” he said.
“By taking core samples from the ice, researchers can gather data going back hundreds of thousands of years. Ice cores can tell us about the history of snowfall, temperatures, winds near the polar regions, and the amount of volcanic dust, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They record the sunspot cycle through variations in the concentration of beryllium-10. They even record the temporary weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field forty thousand years ago. In 1979, scientists identified a tentative link between nitrate spikes in an Antarctic ice core with nearby supernovae. By taking deeper cores, it might be possible to catalog all nearby supernovae of the last few hundred thousand years—something that would be otherwise impossible.”
Another example of the strange correlation