Goldylocks zone planet: very few must exist (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 10, 2017, 11:50 (2815 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

(Tony, would you please reproduce the passage on which you comment? It saves precious time hunting back and forth!)

Dhw (to David;) Of course I don't "KNOW" anything, and nor do you, but what other judgement can either of us use? Please explain, then, how you think a solar system that died billions of years ago, billions of light years away from our own, might have been vital for the production of human beings. If you can’t do so, then you should be able to understand why I am sceptical.
Tony: It may NOT have been directly related to human creation. It may have been necessary to creating a universe in who life could exist, though. There are so many interdependant links between seemingly unrelated things that absolutely must exist for life to even be possible that it is staggering. What you are asking is akin to asking what crushing ore has to do with your brakes. Nothing at all, directly, but if it never happened, no one would able to make your brakes.

It is David who insists that his God created the universe for the sake of producing humans. I’m afraid your own response, that my long defunct solar system “may have been necessary”, is hardly an answer. Analogies with human inventions really don’t help me either. It is the vastness and remoteness of these billions of solar systems extant and extinct that underlie my scepticism.

DAVID: Are you forgetting how special this universe has to be in fine tuning for life to appear. Therefore the universe had to be planned in a very special way to evolve to the point when the Earth formed. Solar systems came and went until the right one appeared.

And there you have the nub of this particular matter. Are you, then, saying that your God experimented with billions of wrong solar systems until he was able to create the right one (though you reject experimentation on the asteroid thread)? How does that make my long-gone, far-away wrong one vital for the production of humans? The atheist can say that billions of wrong solar systems came and went until the right one came along, and what a stroke of luck for all of us. (I find both hypotheses equally incredible.)

DAVID: God worked with an evolving universe. Look at the whole picture, not bits and pieces.

According to you, God made the universe to evolve so that it would produce humans. But you only look at bits and pieces in the form of those factors which we know gave rise to life and eventually to humans. So once again: please look at the whole picture and tell me why you think a solar system that died billions of years ago, billions of light years away from our own, might have been vital for the production of human beings.