James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Monday, June 22, 2009, 11:17 (5632 days ago) @ David Turell

This is interesting, though I'm not as up to speed on the science as you are. My point simply was to say that it is a poor argument to look at the current gaps in our knowledge (here, concerning how organic matter arose from the inorganic) and draw premature conclusions that there must be a supernatural agency or "non-material" force or principle at play. The neat piece of mathematical research seems to put a serious dent in dhw's early entries on this point. Here we are, barely a year later, and significant progress is being made. - Now, it may well be that the conditions necessary for life to begin on Earth were vanishingly unlikely (to wit, Fred Hoyle and his jumbo jet analogy, always quoted by creationists - they get very excited when a real scientist seems to support their cause). I say it doesn't matter. With the discovery of more and more exo-planets, we learn how common planatery systems seem to be in this galaxy and, by extension, the Universe. We don't need the Drake equation to imagine the possibilities. - One cannot extrapolate from an example of one but the insights into how life developed here appear to show that the Universe is poised to produce life whenever the conditions are right. Mr LeFanu purports to learn lessons from science but he ignores the most important one of all - that there is nothing inherently special about the Earth or our place in the Universe. Why Us? Well, because we're here! - "That which we can expect to observe depends on the conditions necessary for our existence as observers" - the anthropic cosmological principle. It has been attacked as being a uselsss tautology but one can't help feeling LeFanu would have benefitted from its consideration.