Fine-tuning

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The Earth rises above the lunar horizon, photographed from Apollo 8, December 24, 1968. (NASA)

Apollo 8 and Our Privileged Planet

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon. The historic flight set the stage for a lunar landing less than a year later. It was also the first time human eyes viewed Earth directly as a complete sphere or saw the far side of the moon.

But what many people most remember about astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders is what they did that Christmas Eve of 1968. Emerging from the moon’s far side during their fourth orbit, they were mesmerized by their vision of Earth, a delicate, gleaming swirl of blue and white, contrasting with the barren lunar horizon — the famous Earthrise picture.

To mark the event, the crew decided, after much deliberation, to read the first ten verses from the book of Genesis, starting with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The reading, and the reverent silence that followed, went out over a live telecast to an estimated 1 billion viewers, then the largest audience in television history. It was a noble and poetic moment, one that brought people together after a year of political division and strife not unlike 2018.

In his book about Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman notes that the astronauts had chosen the words of Genesis not as a parochial religious expression but rather “to include the feelings and beliefs of as many people as possible.” Indeed, most Earth residents who look at the wonders of nature or the awe-inspiring Earthriseimage instinctively perceive the majesty of a grand design.

Of course, many scientists and others dismiss such perceptions as mere sentiment. Yet scientific evidence has increasingly confirmed what the astronauts, and many who heard them, intuitively sensed on seeing the image of Earth from space.

Astronomers now know that Earth is a rare, life-friendly “oasis in the big vastness of space,” as Borman later reflected. In the past few decades they have discovered that life on our planet depends on many improbable “rare-earth” factors. Earth must orbit the sun at just the right distance, with just the right axial tilt, and with just the right-shaped orbit and right planetary neighbors. Life depends on Earth having a moon of the right size at the right distance. The solar system as a whole must also reside in a narrow life-friendly band of space within our galaxy, the “galactic habitable zone.”

We’ve also come to appreciate that we inhabit a privileged platform for scientific discovery. Earth’s crust is endowed with the abundant mineral and energy resources required for advanced technology, including that necessary for sending astronauts to the moon. Our clear atmosphere and location far from the center of a large galaxy allow us to learn about the universe near and far.

At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Even slight changes to the relative masses of fundamental particles or to the strengths of fundamental forces, or to the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe or to its initial arrangement of mass and energy, would have rendered the universe incapable of sustaining life. In the 1960s, physicists had just begun to discover examples of such fine-tuning. Now they know of many more. This suggests “the common sense interpretation,” as Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, “that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

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Biology reveals evidence of design, Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in this conversation with Michael Medved, but it can’t take us very far in identifying the source of that design. Proponents of intelligent design have been clear about that. For an idea about who or what the designer might be, you need to turn to other scientific fields — physics and cosmology Read More ›

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Children of Light

We associate light with the radiant beams that make the world visible to us. But the visible spectrum is only a tiny percentage of an electromagnetic spectrum that extends unimaginably far in both directions. And, as biologist Michael Denton carefully documents, that tiny band of visual light is crucial to life on Earth. In Children of Light, Denton elucidates the miraculous convergence of properties on the tiny band we call the visible spectrum that has allowed intelligent life to flourish on Earth. Follow the journey of light as it beams down from our Sun, through the protective blanket of our atmosphere, to the Earth. Once here, it powers photosynthesis and unlocks the oxygen needed for life. It allows the high-acuity vision that led us to civilization and technology. Light is just one more part of the epic story of our fine-tuned universe, fit for us to flourish here and come to understand it. This book is the third book in the Privileged Species series, which also includes The Wonder of Water and Fire-Maker. Read More ›
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David Berlinski on The Devil’s Delusion

The author of The Devil’s Delusion, Dr. David Berlinski is an urban scholar with a withering wit to delight and entertain while defending religious thought against a movement of intolerance which now includes much of the scientific elite. David Berlinski proceeds reasonably and calmly to challenge recent scientific theorizing and to expose the unreason from which it presumes to criticize Read More ›

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The Fine-Tuning of the Universe

The term “Big Bang” conjures images of an explosion, and usually when we think of an explosion we imagine a highly chaotic, stochastic event that destroys any order that is present rather than creating or preserving order. The Big Bang was not that kind of an “explosion.” It’s much better understood as a “finely tuned expansion event,” where all the Read More ›

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A Fortunate Universe

Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it — and life as we can imagine it — would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and Read More ›

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Fire-Maker

From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire Read More ›

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Professional audio mixing console in concert.
Image Credit: Day Of Victory Stu. - Adobe Stock

List of Fine-Tuning Parameters

“Fine-tuning” refers to various features of the universe that are necessary conditions for the existence of complex life, including the initial conditions and “brute facts” of the universe, the laws of nature or the numerical constants present in those laws, and local features of habitable planets. Read More ›

Dr. Michael Denton on Evidence of Fine-Tuning in the Universe

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin sits down with Dr. Michael Denton, a Senior Fellow of the CSC who holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. Denton is the author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which has been credited with influencing both Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, as well as Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, which elaborates on the evidence of design in nature. Read More ›