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

by John Clinch , Thursday, July 02, 2009, 11:36 (5622 days ago) @ David Turell

I am aware of the issues raised by that book. Paul Davies also discusses this issue in Are We Alone? I have no doubt that Earth is an extremely rare jewel. - However, as you are doubtless aware, the sun is one of 100bn stars in this galaxy, one of 100bn galaxies in the known Universe, a great many of which (we have learned recently) have solar systems. Another instance, surely, where something that from our vantage point seems vanishingly unlikely - life - is made probable by the sheer volume of possible environments that could potentially give rise to it throughout the Cosmos. - Plainly, we are trying to evaluate an utter unknown: how likely is life? It may seem, as Carl Sagan said, "an awful waste of space" to have absolutely no other intelligent life to keep us company but, in one important sense, it doesn't matter. We KNOW this is a life-producing Universe because we're here, on this pale blue dot in the blackness. The anthropic principle (a much misunderstood notion, it seems to me) reminds us of that. - What I'd be interested in exploring is what conclusion you would draw if it were firmly established that this was the only life-producing planet and whether that conclusion would alter if the opposite were proved - i.e. that (as I suspect) the Universe is teeming with life. It seems to me that, either way, we find ourselves in a life-producing Universe. - I wonder: is the crux of this that a "Rare Earth" view better supports the argument for God's intervention to create life here on Earth? If so, I don't think that's justified. If you say that life is so improbable that it couldn't have arisen "by chance" (or variants on this theme, as has been argued elswhere on this site), this seems to admit the possibility that it is literally a miracle - i.e. God intervening in the operation of Nature, physically, to create life. Whether chance or miraculous intervention occurs once or a million times seems to me to be irrelevant to the argument as to whether there is, or may be, a god. It's a blind alley.