Living on a Priviledged Planet
WindowView has reviewed the thought provoking video presenting us to our priviledged planet. Here is a high resolution trailer for the video, a description for the book follows:
The Priviledged Planet Get the DVD
Read the BookWindowView has yet to review the full text of the 2004 puplication entitled: The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. The following excerpts come from a promotional page posted on the web in advance of the book's release early in 2004. In the future, we will replace this page with a feature WindowView article.
"... one of the most cherished assumptions of materialism, that Earth is an insignificant dust speck in an obscure corner of the universe, is dead wrong. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery provides proof that Earth is a lot more significant than virtually anyone has realized -- except for tenacious post-Copernican theists."
The word proof may stand out here. Is it far fetched? One thing is certain, the discussion in Priviledged Planet" is thought provoking. Further, this gets us thinking "outside the box." Too much of Western education is learn by rote and then parrot details back. That is not thinking. Getting us to actively think about the incredible is just not standard fare. And yet life and all its supporting conditions are just so incredible. The pre-release page goes on:
"The Privileged Planet's astounding findings should lead any open-minded individual to reevaluate entrenched assumptions about the universe -- and even to reconsider our very purpose on what so many have dismissed as a tiny speck orbiting an inconsequential star in one galaxy among billions. As such, this book is a direct and enormously valuable challenge to one of the key foundations of the philosophical relativism that plagues the Western world today. Among the revelations:
- Copernicus: how the popular idea of his achievement contains more ideologically
skewered myth than historical accuracy
- Self-contradictions
and unanswerable questions that doom the "Copernican Principle" -- the flawed
idea that there is nothing special about Earth or its place in the universe
-- as a viable theory, despite its almost universal acceptance today
- Did
God design our surroundings for us to discover information about them? The
close relationship between the measurable aspects of our environment and its
suitability for supporting human life
- Why
Earth would support no life if it were just a bit smaller or larger
- How
Earth is perfectly positioned to allow us to map the structure of our galaxy
even though we are inside it
- Why
the night sky is dark (and perfect for celestial observation), even though
the multiplicity of stars should produce an intensely bright sky, day and
night
- Earth
and the Moon: how they function together as one intricate system -- and how
the Moon is radically different from every other known planetary satellite
- Our
atmosphere's perfect balance: how it transmits most of the radiation that
is useful for life while blocking most of what is lethal
- How
Mars does nothing less than protect the Earth from cataclysmic destruction
- Four
astounding "coincidences" that ensure that our atmosphere contains just the
right amounts of carbon and oxygen for human beings and other living things
- Two
important ways that Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from
factors
that would have prevented life from ever developin
- The
importance of gravity: how a stronger or weaker gravitational force would
not only change the stars and planets, but alter the cosmos as a whole
- Polar
ice: what it reveals not only about climate changes and other developments
on Earth, but about extraterrestrial phenomena
- Water:
striking ways in which it doesn't behave the way most other liquids do --
each of its eccentricities makes it more useful for sustaining life
- Why
it's surprising that Earth has gone so long without another global Ice Age:
the simple substance, found in our atmosphere in abundance, that prevents
a recurrence
- Earthquakes:
not just sources of destruction, but inevitable outgrowths of geological forces
highly advantageous to life
- Two
major long-range extraterrestrial dangers -- and how Earth manages to avoid
them
- Stars:
their remarkable usefulness as testing grounds for the laws of physics
- Four
fundamental forces that have fine-tuned our universe's ability to
sustain life
- The
Sun: a fairly ordinary and typical star? Hardly: it has numerous important,
anomalous, and life-permitting properties
- The
significance of the recently discovered fact that other solar systems differ
from ours in many important ways
- Why the sheer number and size of galaxies does not mean that our universe's capacity to sustain life is just the result of blind chance"
If all this intrigues you, then obtaining a copy of the book is certainly a next step. You can do that here by clicking on the picture of the book cover below.
In addition to the the web based information, we'd like to add that the authors come with good credentials. Dr. Gonzalez is presently an assisstant research professor in astronomy and physics at Iowa State University. Dr. Richards holds a doctorate in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. Their backgrounds blend into building perspectives across the wider view, and that fits well with the idea of taking time to embrace the larger WindowView. The last quotation we offere here gives us a sense of the array of topics that contribute to our planet as a priviledged place in the universe:
"Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present mountains of evidence that exposes the hollowness of today's scientific orthodoxy. They demonstrate that Earth is carefully designed not only to support life, but to give us the best possible view of the universe -- as if the great Designer of the cosmos wanted to help us discover His handiwork. Their investigations are wide-ranging, covering star probes, the physics of the moon, polar ice cores, plate tectonics, our neighboring planets, and much more. Gonzalez and Richards also set out the explosive implications of the facts they present here, and even answer sixteen common objections to the idea that Earth is the product of design."
