The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [81]
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 2
There’s nothing unusual about Earth. It’s an average, unassuming rock 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. 3
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. 4 Sagan put the number at one million for our Milky Way galaxy alone. 5
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 very title of astrobiologist David Darling’s recent book nicely encapsulates this optimistic philosophy: Life Everywhere. 6 He’s enthusiastic about claims that “life may arise inevitably whenever a suitable energy source, a concentrated supply of organic (carbon-based) material and water occur together.” These ingredients, he said, “are starting to look ubiquitous in space.” 7 Consequently, he believes microbial life, at least, “is widespread.” 8
In short, Earth has no privileged status. Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus deflated our oversized ego by putting us in our place long ago—the universe doesn’t revolve around us; instead, we’re just living in a humdrum hamlet off the beaten path in a nondescript suburb of the vast Milky Way. We have no grand role, no meaning, no significance, no reason for being other than . . . well, just being.
“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.” 9
This is the essence of what I was taught as I studied science. Of course, these conclusions neatly bolstered my atheistic values. Somehow I managed to avoid getting too depressed by the personal implications of all of this, strangely finding hope and inspiration in the belief that we are not alone in the universe. Even if God didn’t exist, at least there were millions of advanced civilizations out there.
BEAMING MESSAGES TO HERCULES
Ever since I first watched the classic movie The Day the Earth Stood Still as a child, I’ve been enthralled by the fanciful images of teeming inter-galactic life portrayed in science fiction. Sure, Star Trek and Star Wars were silly—but still, the idea of other exotic creatures living in the strange nooks and crannies of the universe was always intriguing and even comforting to me.
Later I became fascinated by the Drake Equation, an attempt by astronomer Frank Drake to quantify the number of civilizations that might exist in our galaxy. The equation factors in such variables as how many of the two hundred to three hundred billion stars in our Milky Way might resemble our own sun, the percentage of stars that may have planets in habitable zones, and so forth.
Though the specific numbers that scientists then plugged into Drake’s equation mostly amounted to rank conjecture fueled by their own biases—one scientist admitted it was “a way of compressing a large amount of ignorance into a small space