The Problem: Apparent Design
The Problem: Apparent Design
In the fall of 1973, the world's most eminent astronomers and physicists gathered in Poland to commemorate the 500th birthday of the father of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus.…Yet of the dozens of scientific lectures presented…only one would be remembered decades later.…The title of the paper was technical sounding and the tone of the presentation highly tentative: “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.” For the insights he presented, 500 years after Copernicus's birth, spelled nothing less than the philosophical overthrow of the Copernican revolution itself.…
Carter called his notion the “anthropic principle” from the Greek word anthropos, “man.”…The anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common—these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life.4
This quotation from Glynn's 1997 book, God, the Evidence, lays out the amazing endgame of five hundred years of Copernican speculation. Since 1973, the Anthropic Principle has effectively supplanted Copernicus within the field of cosmology. Why has this happened, and what is driving the reconsideration of the Copernican Principle? In essence recent physical investigation has revealed the following four independent problems with a strictly materialist worldview:
The laws of physics, even the “fortunate” circumstances of the Earth itself, seem contrived, as if there were a designer. The Earth may not be the physical center of the universe, but it does seem to be its biological center.