Copernicus, God, and Goldilocks: Our Place and Purpose in the Universe

Copernicus,

God, and

Goldilocks

Our Place and Purpose in the

Universe

David A. J. Seargent

Copyright © 2001 by David A. J. Seargent.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

Orders@Xlibris.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I

II

III

IV

Conclusion & Reflection

Appendix

References

For my wife Meg, David Austen, Gary, Margaret,

Cameron, Elliott and Claudia Hartman.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend a special thank you to my wife Meg for taking the time from a busy schedule to read the initial draft of the manuscript of this book. Her comments and encouragement are greatly appreciated.

I am indebted to Professor Guillermo Gonzalez for his reading of an early draft and for his help and encouragement in bringing this project to fruition. Indeed, much of the inspiration for the writing of this book was provided by his work. Truly, he has pursued a refreshingly original approach to this controversial field of study.

Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank the staff of Xlibris for their assistance in the final preparation of this book and for their all-important role in bringing it into the hands of you, the reader!

INTRODUCTION

For many centuries humanity took it for granted that the earth had been specially prepared for us. We were God’s special creation, the centre of the universe and the special concern of our divine Maker. It was long believed that the earth was indeed the physical centre of the universe and that the rest of creation literally revolved around us.

The revolution in thought associated with the name of Nicholas Copernicus (1473—1543) changed all this.

What Copernicus proposed, and subsequent discovery confirmed, was certainly a leap in our understanding of the physical world but it spawned a revolution in thought that progressed far beyond the actual scientific discoveries themselves.

From thinking of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, we came to view mankind as nothing but a tiny speck swallowed up by the infinite ocean of the cosmos. Far from being the special interest of the Creator, we relegated ourselves to such a lowly position that we wondered if the Creator would even notice us, or even if a personal Creator existed at all. The leaders of modern thought were apt to dismiss God as nothing more than an illusion invented by mankind to try to ease his cosmic loneliness and to make believe that we have an importance that in actual fact is not ours.

Two of the corollaries which followed from this new view of our place in the great scheme of things were, first, the perception of mankind as a mere part of nature that had evolved from the primordial slime without benefit of cosmic design or a Creator God and, secondly, that there is nothing special about either ourselves or our planet and that, as a consequence of this, the universe should be filled with similar planets inhabited by similar conscious beings. Many people now accept these as self evident truths, reinforced by an educational system—both formal in our schools and informal through articles in popular science magazines—that not only does not foster critical thought on these matters but which actively pours scorn on opinions that question the ‘official’ or ‘establishment’ line, no matter how well thought out and expressed these counter positions might be.

Nevertheless, all is not as well with popular orthodoxy as its champions would like us to believe… or even, probably, as they believe themselves. While in no way wishing to denigrate the discovery of Copernicus and subsequent scientists whose truly brilliant work has enabled us to perceive for the first time our place in the physical universe, the present author takes strong issue with the philosophical conclusions which have been drawn from these discoveries. It will be argued that the Copernican Principle has been raised by philosophers of science to a level totally unwarranted by the scientific discoveries themselves; that it has been given the status of a fundamental feature of Reality—a philosophical ‘law’ by which Nature confines humanity to a lowly place in the scheme of things. It will further be demonstrated that the Copernican Principle (when given the status of a philosophical principle) makes certain predictions about the nature of the universe; predictions which, though at one time popular with scientists just because they flowed from the Copernican view of the universe, have been disproved by more recent research. For a principle of science or philosophy, falsification is normally considered a fatal defect, but it seems that the Copernican Principle has become so much a part of our thought that these discoveries (though accepted by nearly everyone) are seldom even raised against it. It is as if mental compartmentalization has protected our Copernican faith—and ‘faith’ is just what it is—in a safe environment untouched by the real issues of scientific discovery.

The author suggests another interpretation of the implications of those scientific discoveries, by Copernicus and others, that have been used as evidence for the (philosophical) ‘Copernican Principle’.

Recent scientific evidence that goes against the usual Copernican interpretation will also be examined and evaluated.

From this recent evidence, the earth emerges as being a place ‘just right’ for human life to flourish. This is the basis for what will be called the ‘Goldilocks Principle’—the principle stating that a ‘just right’ balance of many factors must be attained for complex life to survive. Furthermore, to be ‘just right’, these many factors have to converge in just the right way and at just the right time. It will be argued that an environment suitable for human life has been made possible on our home planet by a very low-probability combination of many factors—some of which were themselves very low-probability events—that conspired to make our planet’s conditions suitable for advanced life. This is raised as tentative evidence for intelligent design, while recognizing that arguments can be brought against that suggestion in the absence of further elaboration and refinement.

The counter-design arguments are then examined and it is shown how any argument that attempts to explain away evidence for a purposeful design in any system (without recourse to an intelligent designer) encounters serious problems of logic. These are seen to be precisely the problems which are raised by those arguments which attempt to give a coherent account of the apparent design found in nature while at the same time denying the existence of a Designer God.

Issues surrounding the creation event itself will then be examined and philosophical objections to theories that attempt an explanation of the creation of universe from the laws of physics alone will be discussed and criticized.

The arguments found in these pages are presented as a challenge to a world view which has too often been assumed correct without examination. Yet, it is on the basis of precisely this world view that challenges are raised against the theistic—and specifically the Christian—view of reality. If this small book can demonstrate that the ‘Copernican’ world view is indeed flawed and in need of challenge, the author’s hope and prayer will have been answered.

I

SETTING THE STAGE

Although this is not primarily a book about astronomy, any discussion of the earth in its cosmic setting must of necessity involve a certain knowledge of things astronomical. So, with apologies to those readers who are well versed in the subject, the present chapter will attempt to paint a broad picture of the setting in which our planet is found by giving the reader a crash course in (very!) basic astronomy. Those readers who are already familiar with the science or have read a textbook on basic astronomy recently may like to skim quickly through the coming several pages and go straight to the last section of this chapter and thence to the main meat of the book. For the rest, I would ask that you bear with me as the force of the argument in later chapters will be lost without at least some basic appreciation of the cosmic setting of our planetary home.

To begin, the earth is one of nine planets and myriads of smaller objects in what is known as the Solar System. All of these planets and their smaller brethren (about which more will be said later) orbit the star which we know as the sun. The sun is a star like any of the others that we see in the night sky. The only difference lies in its relative proximity to earth, plus the fact that our planet is gravitationally bound to it in a way that it is to no other.

But just saying that the sun is a star does not really describe it. What is a star anyway?

Essentially, a star is a vast thermonuclear furnace in which hydrogen atoms are fused into helium with the release of vast amounts of energy in the form of heat, light and other forms of radiation. Compared to the earth, stars are huge. The sun’s volume could swallow 1.3 million earths and if it were placed on a cosmic set of scales it would need 332,948 planets the mass of our own to balance it.

The sun is about mid way along the range of mass and brightness of stars. There are stars in the sky that glow a thousand times more dimly than the sun, but there are others that shine a million times brighter.

The sun is close by the standard of stars, yet to our way of thinking its distance is great. We orbit it on a path that varies slightly from a perfect circle and its average distance from us is about 150,000,000 kilometres in round figures. For convenience sake, astronomers use the distance between sun and earth as a measuring unit for solar system distances. They call this the Astronomical Unit (AU for short). To convert AU into kilometres (approximately), multiply by 150 million and into miles, by 93 million. Please bear this in mind as you read the following.

If we were to start from the sun and measure outwards to the orbiting planets in terms of the Astronomical Unit, the closest planet, Mercury, comes in at around 0.4 AU, Venus at just over 0.7 AU, earth (as we have said) at 1, Mars at around 1.5, Jupiter at 5, Saturn at 10, Uranus at 19 and Neptune at 30. Tiny, distant, Pluto moves in an orbit that takes it from just under 30 to near 50 AU from the sun.

The moon orbits the earth at a mean distance of just under 0.003 AU.

Of all the planets in the solar system, only Venus is approximately the same size and mass as earth (actually, a little smaller on both counts but still close enough to be named our sister planet). Mercury and Mars are smaller. They have equatorial diameters of 4,878 and 6,794 kilometres respectively, against 12,756 for earth and 12,104 for Venus. Our moon has an equatorial diameter of 3,476 kilometres, so Mercury and Mars are at least as moonlike as they are earthlike.

The real heavyweights of the solar system are the four large planets which lie beyond the orbit of Mars. Jupiter is the king of them all. With an equatorial diameter of 142,800 kilometres, it could swallow a thousand earths. Saturn is somewhat smaller with a diameter of 120,000 kilometres, however it contains only 15% of giant Jupiter’s mass, making it the least dense of all the sun’s retinue of planets. In fact, if there was an ocean large enough to accommodate it somewhere in the universe, Saturn would actually float on water!

This last fact tells us that we should not think of Jupiter and Saturn simply as overgrown versions of earth or Mars. They are really quite different from the small rocky ‘terrestrial’ planets closer to the sun and in certain respects more closely resemble failed stars than planets (‘failed’ in the sense that they