Comments on Privileged Planet. It is a very well done book. The authors are restrained in making theological conclusions and hold to an interesting standard of scientific observation and correlation. This appears more representative of the growing maturity of this design movement. It reflects the best of human reasoning and rationality.

And their lines of argument do well to restore some common sense to scientific argumentation (noted by Wiker and Witt as missing in contemporary science). As the Privileged Planet authors say on p.267-270, a man who is sent before a firing squad of 50 sharpshooters and all miss from 3 meters but their shots form a perfect outline of his body- he could conclude as materialists do that he should not be surprised because if they had not missed he would not be here to observe it. A more common sense conclusion would be that the execution had been rigged. This would be the best explanation of the evidence. Shrugging one’s shoulders and concluding it is just a chance occurrence is ‘dense’, they say.

But materialists seek recourse to nonsensical explanations like infinite other universe to buttress their chance arguments. There is absolutely no evidence for such resources. However, to maintain the Copernican Principle of meaninglessness they must appeal to such make believe resources and as astronomers Adams and Laughlin have said, the multiverse theory sets them up for “the next battle of the Copernican revolution”. Battle referring to the ideological nature of the issue- the ideology being, just as our planet is not special, nor our solar system, so our universe is not special. This multiverse argument to support Copernican Principle meaninglessness is ‘fanciful science fiction’ and as Gonzalez and Richards say regarding the man who escaped execution, if he would argue that there must be millions of other executions going on around and given so many tries, some group of shooters will all miss their target and paint an outline of bullets around the target, so the authors say, “that to summon other universes into existence is clearly bad faith, since we would never accept such reasoning in any other area…No one would accept this because, one, such an ad hoc inflation of the available ‘tries’ is without evidence, and two, such a response to events would destroy our ability to make practical judgments”.

But in the current scientific climate no amount of evidence is allowed to account for any design. Science is not about the search for the best explanation based on actual evidence but rather the search for the best materialist explanation, no matter how irresponsible and irrational and dismissive of entire classes of evidence.

This denial of common sense is also evident in beginnings research. Despite the massive evidence that the universe had a beginning, effort is now being made to once again deny this Big Band science. New theoretical explanations are being sought to get things back on track toward materialist explanations, such as eternal cycles of rebirth (expanding and collapsing universes). This has a touch of Eastern reincarnation. It is pure religious speculation. Lacking common sense.

Some quotes- “if science involves thinking hard and open-mindedly about the empirical evidence before us, is it really scientific to ignore this evidence because it doesn’t fit into some philosophical box?”

“For most of human history most individuals have inferred design when viewing certain natural objects and nature as a whole…researchers trusted their intuitions…we are adept and inveterate pattern detectors”

On this intuitive ability of humans to detect design- one way natural structures have been assumed to have been designed is because certain natural structures have ‘value’ to which we attach meaning and which we associate with mind and intentions. This may be hard to define but we know it when we see it. For instance, art and music have a value that trash and noise don’t. So with living organisms.

Anyway, so much more good argumentation and reasoning. But as they say near the end, while argument for design provides support for the existence of God it doesn’t prove that the God of traditional belief exists.

And in their conclusion they make some interesting comments about human beings knowing a great deal more than they can explain or describe explicitly and having an inbuilt ability to detect patterns that speak to purpose. This ability has been blunted for over a century with the prohibiting of seeing evidence of purpose or intelligent design in nature. This ability to discern meaning has to be cultivated. To read through nature to its meaning. I thought of Jesus’ exceptional ability in this regard. Our generation needs especially to learn to remain open to the almost forgotten possibilities here.

After once again referring to Sagan’s movie, Contact, and the human longing for personal encounter with some form of transcendence, they conclude: “Perhaps we have also been staring past a cosmic signal far more significant than any mere sequence of numbers, a signal revealing a universe so skillfully crafted for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extra-terrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we’ve been willing to expect or imagine”.

Naturalist science has had great success over the past few centuries in freeing us from distorting religious myth that had long shaped our perceptions of reality and life. But along the way things have become blurred in science. Too many have come to believe that the naturalist approach of science (observation, hypothesis formation, testing, replication and what not) could explain everything in reality and life. It has become the final truth teller in modern society. And then materialist philosophy (that there is only the material and nothing else and this is governed by random forces), this philosophy jumped into naturalist science to emphasize the random element, the accidental, and then concluded it is all meaningless accident. The entire universe, life and humanity. This was a profound devaluation of humanity. Human beings were just animals and just accidents in the overall scheme of things. And because humans were more intelligent animals they were more dangerous animals.

This focus on minor aberrational downturns or accidents missed the great overall trends. It missed the core of life and reality and its direction. It distorted naturalist science.

We should still value a naturalist science that speaks to how nature functions at a more superficial level (the visible and currently knowable). But this must be separated from a materialism that with its nihilist bent seeks to ignore the overall greater trends toward order and amazing complexification, to focus on the aberrational such as apparent random elements and accident. It then employs this to define life as overall just a meaningless accident. Worth nothing. Such science is not the final truth teller in society.

This dark materialist viewpoint that devalues humanity and life in general, leads to such hopelessness and sends people off in search of meaning in the wrong directions. Hence, the continuing strength of such things as nature worship (we are just another species of animal- nothing special- so try to find some greater meaning in nature, perhaps in ecosystems as new gods to be subject to).

Life in its mysterious wholes is so much more. Individual human beings as the most awesome whole- conscious of beauty, love, meaning, life or better Life (Life as the fundamental impulse that causes all things to form their unique shapes and live their lives, but it does this in a qualitatively different way to living, conscious human persons). And conscious humans can sense and see that it is all so much more than what naturalist science can know and explain, life in general and especially our conscious existence and experience. It is so much more than accidental collections of atoms or molecules driven by electrical and chemical interactions based on so-called natural laws (we have no idea of knowing what these are about).

Consciousness contains these profound impulses to make meaning of life, to engage the full range of human experience and to engage human story and the quest of each individual life toward something more humane. This human story is so much more than just another species trying to survive and propagate further. This greater element of life is so unnatural or supernatural that it needs some philosophical or religious-like approach to understanding and explaining. Some entirely new approach that such things as the new universe story can provide in part with its general trajectory of rise to the ever new thing, the ever new expression of life, love, beauty and more. This understanding of life in its wholes as about rise, growth, development, advance, is entirely counter to the dark nihilism and meaninglessness of materialism.

And yes, this new thing is still to be informed by good naturalist science (such as at the quantum level).