The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [87]
Now in addition to the flat-Earth myth being exploded, here were Richards and Gonzalez asserting that the Copernican Principle was based on faulty history as well.
“So,” continued Richards, “Guillermo and I embarked on a project to document whether there are important ways in which Earth is special or exceptional. To do this we had to show that there’s not this long historical march of science showing how unimportant we are. We had to point out that the history is wrong and that what we’re doing stands in the good tradition of science, which says, ‘Let’s find out what the world is like to the best of our ability.’ ”
“And,” I said, “what did you find?”
Richards and Gonzalez exchanged glances. “Well, scientists have generally followed the Copernican Principle by saying that our planet is ordinary and that therefore life undoubtedly abounds in the universe,” Richards began. “We believe, however, the evidence is quite to the contrary.” He gestured toward his colleague to continue.
“We’ve found that our location in the universe, in our galaxy, in our solar system, as well as such things as the size and rotation of the Earth, the mass of the moon and sun and so forth—a whole range of factors—conspire together in an amazing way to make Earth a habitable planet,” Gonzalez said. “And even beyond that, we’ve found that the very same conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well-suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.”
“And we suspect this is not an accident,” Richards added. “In fact, we raise the question of whether the universe has been literally designed for discovery.”
THE INGREDIENTS FOR LIFE
With that framework set, I moved ahead to discuss one of the main attitudes of scientists who embrace the Copernican Principle. “They believe if you can just find a place anywhere in the universe where water stays liquid for a long enough period of time, then life will develop, just as it did on Earth,” I said. “I assume you don’t agree with that.”
“No, I don’t,” Gonzalez said. “It’s true that in order to have life you need water—which is the universal solvent—for reactions to take place, as well as carbon, which serves as the core atom of the information-carrying structural molecules of life. But you also need a lot more. Humans require twenty-six essential elements; a bacterium about sixteen. Intermediate life forms are between those two numbers. The problem is that not just any planetary body will be the source of all those chemical ingredients in the necessary forms and amounts.”
I interrupted to point out that science fiction writers have managed to speculate about extra-terrestrial life that’s built in a radically different form—for instance, creatures based on silicon instead of carbon.
Gonzalez was shaking his head before I had even finished my question. “That just won’t work,” he insisted. “Chemistry is one of the better understood areas of science. We know that you just can’t get certain atoms to stick together in sufficient number and complexity to give you large molecules like carbon can. You can’t get around it. And you just can’t get other types of liquids to dissolve as many different kinds of chemicals as you can with water. There’s something like half a dozen different properties of both water and carbon that are optimal for life. Nothing else comes close. Silicon falls far short of carbon.
“Unfortunately, people see life as being easy to create. They think it’s enough merely to have liquid water, because they see life as an epiphenomenon—just a piece of slime mold growing on an inert piece of granite. Actually,