What follows is based on part of ch. 2 of:
Spencer, Nick; Waite, Hannah. Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity. SPCK, 2024.
A couple of recent discoveries:
Allan Hills 84001 – a meteorite originating from Mars, discovered in Antarctica in 1984 and in 1986 found to contain ‘possible relic biogenic activity’. (Most experts would now doubt this analysis).
51 Pegasi b – an exoplanet discovered in 1995 orbiting around a sun-like star.…
Scientifically-minded people seem a little confused about whether they think that intelligent life is rather common in the universe, or exceedingly rare.
In 1961 Frank Drake postulated that there might be between 1,000 and 100,000,000 intelligent, communicative, civilisations in our own galaxy. The range of possibility is now thought to be between 2 and 280,000,000 following further review of the various values contained in Drake’s ‘equation’. In other words, we don’t know.
Christian theology has no great interest vested in the question of extra-terrestrial life. …
Philosopher A.C. Grayling has appeared on radio shows on both sides of the Atlantic recently, in order to promote his latest book The God Argument.
I happen to be a regular listener (via the podcasts) of both shows.
The American show is ‘Point of Enquiry’. This is associated with The Centre for Enquiry, which describes itself as ‘a think-tank advancing reason, science and secular values in public affairs and at the grass roots’. Grayling was interviewed Chris Mooney. …
According to the anthropic principle, the universe is extraordinarily adapted for the emergence of life in general, and human life in particular.
The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics outlines an ‘incredibly restrictive set of demands’ that needed to be present in order for life as we know it to emerge.
Until about 50 years ago, conventional scientific wisdom was that the universe had no beginning. But now there is a broad consensus that the cosmos began with the ‘big bang’ around 13.8 billion years ago.
But even if the universe is not infinitely old, this still raises the question of why it is so old, if it was intended by God as a home for human beings, who themselves have been around for only a tiny fraction of those 13.8 billion years.…
A sceptic might argue: if God created the universe as a special place for humanity, then surely he made it vastly bigger than it needed to be. What a colossal waste of space and energy.
There are something like 200 billion galaxies in the universe each containing, on average, about 200 billion stars. But if the universe were much less massive than this then the early cosmos would never have been capable of producing by nuclear fusion elements heavier than helium (elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and so on that are necessary for physical life). …
Further to my entry on the ‘Goldilocks Effect’ – the idea that the universe is ‘just right’ for the emergence of human life – I’ve been thinking about one aspect of this richly variegated theme.
At first sight, the earth’s near neighbour, the moon, seems to have no drastic effect on life here on earth. True, it influences ocean tides and offers a bit of light to see things by at night, but, it seems, little more than that.…
How can humans – tiny specks of transient life that we are – have any significance in a universe so big and so old?
But if the universe were not so vast and so ancient, we would not be here. It has taken 10 billion years for the elements of life to build up in stars.
Many of the ‘constants of nature’, such as the gravitational constant, appear to be extremely finely tuned. Minuscule changes to any of these constants would mean that life could never have developed. …
