The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to another edition of the handgun Plug podcast, a
podcast that is absolutely committed to bringing the most interesting,
informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. And today
I have a guest who is a hero of mine.
I've known him for a long time. I've done a
lot of podcasts with him, and this podcast is on well,

(00:46):
let me just introduce it quickly. It's the twentieth anniversary
edition of the Privileged Planet. We've talked about the Privileged
Planet on this podcast before, but this is a very
important update. And of course Jay answers the question as

(01:06):
to whether or not Earth is a privileged planet. You know,
there are some scientists who are speculating that the Earth
is merely an insignificant spec of soil that is aimlessly
adrift in a meaningless universe. But evidence, and you'll hear

(01:29):
that evidence today refutes the principle of mediocrity and instead
it demonstrates that our Earth will it's singularly privileged and
it's a planet that is designed for discovery. And Jay

(01:50):
gives a lot of reasons for that, and i'll formally
introduce him in just a moment. I'll even mention his
last name. But the first of those the reasons is
that there are unique conditions that are necessary to support
intelligent life, and they turn out to provide the best
overall conditions for scientific discovery. A second reason, and I

(02:16):
put this in a memorable format in one of my books,
But the second reason is that we live in the
best overall age of the universe. Think about that, the
best overall age of the universe. To do cosmology in
our time, the cosmic background radiation that is left over

(02:37):
from the Big Bang is readily observable. But here's the key.
It won't always be like that. And that radiation confirms
that the universe is not eternal, but it began in
the finite past. And let me give you one more reason.
I like to do things in threes. In habitability to discoverability,

(03:02):
and these are two key words in this book, from
habitability to discoverability. Earth status in the universe is surely,
absolutely beyond a doubt, one of privilege. And if you
were to reduce that to an accident of cosmic evolution,
you would be shortsighted. But if you recognize it as privileged,

(03:29):
well that's sublime. And that's precisely why this book is
titled The Privileged Planet, and it is one of my
favorite books. And this is the twentieth anniversary edition and
it has many additions to it that are important. So
this is a book that you can get on the
web at equipped dot org. You can write a post

(03:49):
office box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code
two eight two seven one. It's for those who stand
shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle for life
and truth. Well, let me give you Jay's last name.
If you followed the podcast, you already know what his
last name is. It's Rids J. W. Richards and he
is director of the Divorce Center for Life, Religion, and

(04:13):
Family at the Heritage Foundation. He is a senior fellow
at the Discovery Institute, and he's the executive editor of
The Stream. Now. Jay is incredibly credentialed. If I went
over all of his credentials, that would take a while,
but he is a PhD in philosophy and theology from

(04:38):
Princeton Theological Seminary, among other things. I'm not going to
go through the other things. He has contributed to many
articles on the Christian Research Journal, and he's the author
of fourteen incredible books. Maybe it's more by now, maybe
it's fifteen, I don't know, fourteen or fifteen incredible books,
including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated and Indivisible, and

(05:04):
a book titled Money, Greed in God, which was one
of my favorites. It also won a twenty ten Templeton
Enterprise Award. He wrote a book that I followed religiously
for a long period of time, but I don't anymore.
I need to get back to. When I'm looking at Jay,
I'm thinking, I need to get back to this book.
It's titled Eat Fast and Feast. And then a book

(05:26):
that is incredibly relevant to this age. It's titled The
Human Advantage, The Future of American Work in an Age
of Smart Machines. I mean, that's an incredible book, and
I want to ask Jay a question about that in
just a moment. But the book that we're talking about
today is The Privileged Planet, and we're going to focus

(05:46):
on that remarkable work. It's just come out not long
ago in the updated, revised format. And so Jay, as always,
I love having you on the podcast, and you are
one of my heroes. You're someone that not only does
incredible writing and speaking, but you do the research that's

(06:07):
necessary to be able to demonstrate that what you're talking
about is not your own vivid predilections, but it is
faith founded on a refutable fact. So thanks for being
on the podcast again.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Oh thank you, Hank. It's so great to be with you.
So fun. I mean, we probably talked about the book
twenty years ago, which is kind of scary to think,
but you know, Karamo Gonzalez and I when we were
writing it, we actually realized, Okay, the book's coming on
in two thousand and four. There's going to be a
total solar eclipse in the US in twenty twenty four,
so maybe we'll do it twentieth year anniversary edition and

(06:40):
we'll update it. But of course that's something you tell
yourself and then that's actually what happened. And one of
the most important things that I learned in the process
was that you're a lot better writer twenty years older.
It's because when you read it's like, gosh, I've spent
twenty years writing and trying to translate stuff for broader

(07:01):
and broader audiences, and so we thought would just be
an update in some references ended up really being a rewrite,
not to change the argument, but just to hopefully make
it more accessible.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
And also to update it based on absolutely yeah, just
an incredible piece of work. Before we get into the
Privileged Planet, I did want to ask you a quick
question on the human advantage. We're going to be in
Athens in a month's time, and in this book you
talk about the future of American work in an age
of smart machines. A lot of people think that it
is possible for machines to replace human beings. You make

(07:35):
the argument in that book that that will never happen.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Why right, Because we're not machines, That's the simple answer.
And so for something to entirely replace us, they would
have to be everything that we are. Now you might say, well, okay,
but the things we do their machine like that has
everything to do with our work. And so therefore the
meaningful work that we do will ultimately be replaced by machines.

(08:01):
And so part of this is a metaphysical claim, right,
But part of it is a kind of empirical claim.
And so when I wrote the book it came out
in twenty eighteen, I wanted to give the other side
as much credit as possible and So in other words,
I basically said, Okay, let's assume that anything that can
be automated using a combination of AI and robotics will

(08:22):
be automated. Moreover, let's assume that that's going to happen
in our lifetimes. What does that mean? And the books really,
though there's a lot of philosophy in it, it's really
designed to say, Okay, if that happens, here's what you
need to do to prepare. And my argument is that
in fact, machines will do a lot of stuff that
humans are doing right now, but there's a lot of
other stuff that they won't do. And as long as

(08:43):
we pivot to the things that are uniquely human, we
will be able to do profound things, important things that
are meaningful, that are work. It's just that it will
look different than what it looks like now, just as
the way we farm now looks different than the way
it looked one hundred or two hundred or five hundred
years ago, or the way we write. If technology permanently

(09:06):
replaced people, that is, it permanently created massive unemployment, all
of human history would be this really depressing story of
more and more people finding that they don't have anything
to do. But that's not what happens at all in
different technological stages. What that does is maybe something that
we need a lot of labor for. At an earlier period,

(09:27):
we're able to automate or develop machines so that you know,
it only takes five people to do what it took
five thousand people to do in a previous era. That
doesn't mean there's nothing left to do. It means that
you know, we'd creatures made the image of the creative God.
We find new and important and hopefully dignifying things to
do that presuppose all the technology that sort of went
before us. And so there's a bit of metaphysics in

(09:50):
this water. Humans. Can we be reduced to machines? There's
a good bit of economics, and then there's also some
predictions about what I thought was and was not going
to happen. And I thought, for instance, that long automated
long haul trucks that would be easier to pull off
than say a housekeeper that's entirely robotic, because that involves

(10:10):
complex movement through space. I'd say the biggest surprise is
probably how powerful these chatbots large language models are, how
good they are. But it doesn't prove that we're machines.
It doesn't mean these things are going to become conscious.
It just means that we're able to develop systems that
can call and sort and run probabilities on all the

(10:33):
intelligent choices that we make. And so everything you see
in claude or in chat GPT for is it the self.
It's itself the result of human intelligence, and the data
it's trained on is all information that's the result of
human intelligence. And so I just think that's the kind
of fundamental reality. And the nice thing is there's this
metaphysical claim the transhumanists make that machines will surpass us.

(10:56):
The best we can do is upload ourselves to the
machines give specific dates. And so I said, okay, great,
let's make some empirical claims and see who's right and
who's wrong about this stuff.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah. So what about the panpsychism, the idea that somehow
or other there's a materialistic way in which you can
explain consciousness.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, it seems so strange to me, because, of course,
as you said, pan psychism, in some ways that would
be the philosophically consistent way that transhumanists could sort of
do this, that every bit of matter, you know, sort
of has a little consciousness in it, and when you
combine it into larger and larger structures like a human, right,
we're made up of all sorts of different cells, then

(11:37):
there's kind of this emergent consciousness for matter. That's an
interesting argument. I don't think it finally really works, because
we all pretty much we recognize that there's just the
constituents of matter are not themselves agents in the ways
that humans or even say animals are. But what's interesting
is that almost all the transhumanists don't go that route.
They're not pan psychists, they're not pantheasts, their material realists.

(12:00):
And so you get someone like Ray Kurzweil, who in
a sense really believes that we're machines. And so he thinks, look,
you get computers working fast enough and sophisticated enough, they
really can become everything we are. And then you say, okay, well,
so what are you talking about? What about our consciousness?
What about our agency? What about the fact that we're persons?
And he will either say, well, that's something that can

(12:22):
be uploaded by which he ends up meaning a brain pattern,
or he says, well, who's to say that we're conscious.
Maybe we're just that's an illusion or something, which to
me is okay, you're making an argument that our consciousness
an agency is an illusion. That's a pretty good argument
that whatever you're thinking is seriously wrong. Right. If that's
your conclusion, I doubt your premise. But that's the kind

(12:43):
of dilemma if you're a committed materialist, you're sort of
stuck because it's not like you could say, well, I
believe that humans are a unique hybrid of body and soul,
and the soul can somehow be detached from the body
and uploaded. They never appeal to that, so they never
going to deal to a Christian anthropology, never really even
appealed pensychism. They're just materialists and they're inconsistent. And I

(13:04):
think the reason they're inconsistent is because all of us,
no matter what our kind of metaphysical views, if in
fact human beings are this unique. We're unique creatures that
are the dust of the earth and the breath of God.
We are fully human, are fully material, fully spiritual. At
the same time, if your anthropology doesn't get that right,

(13:26):
then you're going to go off the rail somewhere. But
you're never ultimately going to be able to deny it.
So even the materialist who really doesn't have a basis
for believing he has freedom or agency or consciousness, nevertheless
presupposes it when he's not thinking about it, and so
he ends up being inconsistent. And so materialists almost always
end up kind of metaphysically schizophrenic, which is what I
think you have. You certainly have this in transhumanism, you

(13:49):
have it in gender ideology, where the person is treated
as a kind of disembodied gender soul that might get
stuck in the wrong body. All these attempts to kind
of account for humanity, but without getting the Christian and
the Biblical understanding of the richness of what the human
person is. If you don't get that, you still have
to be confronted by it because you are yourself a

(14:10):
human person and all of its fullness. But your metaphysic
doesn't really and can't really account for it.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, I want to get right to the privileged planet.
You know, we did do the first broadcast on this
back in two thousand and four. As you mentioned, I
had hairback then. You still have here twenty years later.
But what is the privileged planet hypothesis.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
You summarized it. It's basically here's the claim is that
those rare places in the universe where life can exist,
that is, the most habitable places in the universe, are
also the best places overall for doing science, for scientific discovery.
So observers, complex observers like ourselves find themselves in the
best places overall for observing. And so this is multiple

(14:58):
parts of this argument are required. The is this whole
idea of habitability that not just any old place is
going to be good for life. Almost everything we learned
and everything frankly we've learned since in the last twenty years,
I think shows that you got to get a lot
of stuff at the local level, that is the level
of the planetary system just right in order to have

(15:21):
a planet that can even host life. We're not I'm
talking about life itself. We're just talking about a planet
in which life can exist and persist. And so that's
interesting on its own. But you could ask this other question, Okay,
if you were if you needed to do science, you
needed to discover whether the universe had a beginning. That's
got to be the biggest question. How old the universe is,
how it works what the stars are, what the world

(15:44):
is made of, what fundamental principles govern the movements of matter.
All these kinds of questions you need to ask, you know,
if you're going to do science, and then you say, okay,
and you could pick only one place to be, where
would that be? And you run the analysis of what
you discover is the best place to be is the
one place where life can exist. That's an astonishing discovery.

(16:06):
It's one thing to say that habitable planets are very
rare in the universe. It's another thing to say that
there's this pervasive pattern in which the things you need
to build a habitable planet also set that planet up
for doing science, and science in that place can be
done a lot better than the less habitable places. And

(16:27):
it's that coincidence, that combination of the needs for life
and the needs for scientific discovery together that we think
that forms a strong design argument. It's like, okay, look,
if the universe is designed for discovery, that's exactly what
you would expect. If you're a materialist that thinks everything
is the result of blind chance and necessity. This is

(16:48):
just there's really no explanation for it. It's just a
weird brute fact that you can to count for. So, yeah,
maybe this isn't a deductive proof for God's existence, but
it's a pretty darn strong argument for design of the
universe by an intelligence that transcends it.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
So explain what your argument is not because a lot
of critics say that you're making the claim that Earth
is unique and therefore it is designed. That's not really
your argument, is.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
It not at all? And in fact, whether Earth or
earth like planets are common or rare in the universe
is metaphysically ambiguous. So he put it this way. If
there's a transcendent God, as we believe, God could create
the universe in a lot of ways. He could have
made it just our solar system with life on Earth.
He could have made it where there's habital planets everywhere.

(17:37):
All those things are sort of possible for God. And
so it's not like theism entails either that life be
rare or life be common. And so just because you
discover that, Okay, we've got a really big universe, maybe
ten to the twenty two observable stars in the universe,
the observable universe, that's a big place. A lot of

(17:59):
potential planets are around those stars. It could be. For instance,
if you're a materialist, you might say, okay, well, maybe
it's just really really hard to get the conditions for life.
But in a universe that's large enough, one will happen
to have the conditions that life needs. It's like a
vast cosmic lottery, and in that one place life will,

(18:19):
you know, presumably evolve or appear. And that's kind of
the materialist assumption. And so a materialist could be fine
with life being rare in the universe, even though most materialists,
for some reason go the other way. They think, well,
you know, whatever happened here must have happened countless times elsewhere,
because there's nothing special about the Earth's that's the general
kind of drift in the debate. Nevertheless, gambl Ganzals and

(18:42):
I say, look, really kind of metaphysically, it could go
either way, and so we want to know empirically whether
that's true or not. And so we just think that
it would be a bad argument to say, Okay, well, gosh,
it's Earth like planets or habitb planets are really rare
in the universe. Therefore God had to do it, Because
that's not a great argument. I mean, no way else

(19:03):
to put it, But that is what people very often
thought the argument was going to be, because it takes
a bit of time to explain that. No, we're building
an argument on this remarkable coincidence of the needs for
life and the needs for scientific discovery. We needed the
rarity in order to see the pattern that, in fact,
you know, compared to most of the other places and

(19:24):
the other planets where that we actually know exist, there's
just a few that actually made, only one that we
know of so far that that can possibly host life,
And so it's very interesting to discover that those very
rare places are also the best places for doing science.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, so your argument is about the fact that Earth
is habitable and it's also a perfect place for scientific discovery.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
That's right, Yeah, or perfect in the sense that it's
the sort of condition if you think of these things.
There's lots of trade offs of course that have to
be made so the best overall place, like in other words,
if you can only pick one place and you need
to know things, say about the recent past, you'd need
to know things about the distant pass. You need to

(20:15):
know some stuff about physics, whether the universe had a beginning,
all these kinds of things. It turns out there you
got to there's complicated trade offs because there's kind of
competing conditions. So, for instance, if all you wanted to
do was discover the background radiation, okay, well, the best
place to detect that would be between galaxies, probably an
intergalactic space. But you would optimize your situation to discover

(20:36):
that one thing. That would be a terrible place to
discover the laws of gravity or what happened in the
recent past, or to do chemistry. And so what you
want is to optimize for all these kinds of competing conditions.
And when you get that, that's the argument that in fact,
what you get is an earth like planet. You get
the planet that we have. We can't prove that there

(20:58):
aren't Earth like other earth like planets in the universe.
We really don't have enough evidence one or the other.
But we can make a prediction that if we're right,
if there are other Earth like planets in the universe,
they will be very very very much like the Earth.
They will have moons and suns very much like ours.
They'll have perfect siliar eclipses like we enjoy. So that's
actually a prediction of our argument. We don't predict you'll

(21:21):
never find an Earth like planet. We say, if you
find one, it will be very much like the Earth.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
So it'd be an Earth twin.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, I'd be an Earth twin. In fact, Germo says,
if we ever get detect a radio transmission, for instance,
from some other intelligent civilization, the first thing we should
do is send them digital copies of our pictures, of
our best silary eclips pictures, and ask them to send
to some of theirs.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
I want to quote your favorite astrophysicist, Neil de grass Tyson,
who is an evangelist for our insignificance. You believe in
our significance. He believes in our insignificance. And he actually
says this, and you quote this in the book. Every
advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that

(22:09):
we live on a cosmic speck of dust orbiting a
mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort
of galaxy, a common sort of galaxy among one hundred
billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic

(22:30):
unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche. So
he's basically talking about the Copernican principle, the principle of mediocrity.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
That's right, yeah, And so Neil de Grasse Tyson is
the kind of our generation's current incarnation of Carl Sagan,
whom we of course also quote in the book. And
Carl Sagan, who's since deceased, was the science popularizer that
said this, if I can, wrote a book called Blue
Dot in which he said, we don't hold a privileged
position in the universe. To Grass, Tyson says the same thing.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Of course.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Notice the kind of evalue of judgments here. So he
says that we're in some unassuming suburb in the galaxy. Well, okay,
so the obvious question is where would you want to
be in the galaxy? Okay, so we're a large spiral galaxy,
which you call the Milky Way. So where would be
the best spot to be? And you say, okay, best
for what? Well, how about best for life? That's really

(23:27):
the interesting thing, right we know that, Well, the last
place you'd want to be is the center of the galaxy.
It probably has a giant black hole. There's all this
X rank emma radiation, got stars popping off and getting
sucked in. It's the most hostile place in the galaxy.
If you're in the outer part of the Solar System,
it's mostly hydrogen helium. There's not even enough sort of

(23:48):
heavy materials to build Earth like planets. If you're inside
a spiral arm, you're going to have that's also much
riskier because of star formation. Where you'd want to be,
as it turns out when you study all the conditions
for what you need in a galaxy. So the so
called galactic capital zone is midway out between the center
and the edge of the galaxy, between spiral arms and

(24:11):
rotating again about the same speed as the spiral arms.
Guess where we are. We're exactly there. We're right in
the sweet spot of the galactic capital zone. And so
for the thing you would be interested in, we're in
prime location. It's only by you know, sort of sleight
of hand implying that, well, we're not in the center
of the galaxy or something that anyone could be tricked

(24:33):
by that. What does it mean for a star to
be ordinary? First all, it's not true most of the
stars of the galaxy, or these red m dwarf stars.
Our star is quite stable. It's the single star, so
it's not a binary or triplet system again for life,
this is exactly what you'd want. And so you just
add up and we could go through a list of

(24:54):
about thirty of these things, and the stuff that he
considers insignificant clearly or not. It's only by I sort
of assuming the ignorance of his audience as to the details,
so that they'll just kind of get the ambiance that, well, yeah,
it is a big universe, and we don't you know,
it doesn't look like an interesting place to be in
the galaxy. And so it's really a kind of surface

(25:15):
level analysis, assuming that people are just sort of stupefied
by the size of the universe or something like that.
But again, notice that the folks that say, well, we're
insignificant because we're small relative to the universe, they never
do the opposite. They never say, well, we're on the
other hand, we're really significant compared to the size of
elementary particles quorks. Right. I mean you could argue that,

(25:39):
but of Chris physical size and significance, they're just two
different things. We're not going to answer the question one
way or the other with that, and the details are
going to be subtler. And if you know, that's what
I actually think, if the universe is created by God,
it is a book meant to be read. Expect it
to be subtle so that people that are open to
the evidence, open to being able to read it under

(26:00):
and its meeting, can detect that. But if you want
these kind of superficial stories, like Neili Grass, Tyson tells, well,
God gives you the freedom to be able to believe those,
but it really is a superficial treatment.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Yeah, And that really gets to a point that I
want to drive home. If you would people like Tyson,
they make these dogmatic assertions, not defensible arguments, and I
think today people no longer think, they no longer ponder,
they no longer examine. We're hit by so much information,

(26:33):
information overload that we can't process it. And I'm wondering,
even as the father of many children, how do you
inoculate people that really don't have an opportunity to think
through these things as you have. I mean, obviously this
is one of the reasons you wrote the book The
Privileged Planet. But not everybody will read a big book

(26:53):
like that. In fact, many people don't read anymore. How
do you inoculate people against these I mean, in the
political realm you hear are these incredibly fabricated statements, but
they're just communicated as though they're common sense fact and
people are getting the information so quickly they can't really
fact check it if you will.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
That's right. I mean, this is the irony of our moment, Hank,
is that if you know how to do it, you
can get access to almost any information from your house.
But on the other hand, it's curated and manipulated, and
most of us have lost the ability to focus. I mean,
you said, how do you inoculate your children? And you
inoculate your children by making sure that they I honestly

(27:35):
think you aren't exposed to a lot of this stuff.
So they're not exposed to the kind of fast movie
technology until the brains can handle it. You help them
to develop the attention span to be able to read
and study and ponder great texts.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
What does that mean? Does that mean, Jay, you take
the smartphones out of their hands.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah, it means that if they're a little kid, you
do not give them access to smartphones. Absolutely. I mean,
you know, maybe fifteen years ago I hadn't thought that
much about this because you know, they had just come ALIGNE.
But I'm really glad that, you know, smartphones were first
of all expensive and not really available when our girls
were little anyway, and so they got through that. But
I've now seen what happens in kids. Really young kids

(28:16):
are given screens way too early. And I'm not no
one can accuse me of being a luddite, but this
technology is designed kind of it's for images and short
attention spans for most people, and that's it's quite clear
that people's capacity for attention is diminishing, and this is
the difficulty. So how do you inoculate people in general

(28:37):
that are subject to that to these bad ideas? Well?
You have to reach them in different ways. You do
it on podcasts, for instance, or you do it in
documentary style format, and so you hope that you can
point people to the source, which is the big book
with you know, one hundred pages of references. But I
always try to remind myself that most people are going

(28:59):
to read the headline and hear the summary, and so
I've got to figure out how to boil this down.
I can tell you this is always the difficulty with
this book. First of all, it's a lot of data.
It's a cumulative case argument and also it takes a
couple of steps to explain it because it was just
Earth's unique and rare and therefore God designed it. That'd
be really simple. But it's a little more complicated than that.

(29:19):
But I also think it's much more satisfying once you
get what's going on. And that's the difficulty. So first
optimize how you're going to inoculate your kids by giving
the capacity for attention. But then just as God condescends
to us and our capacities, we have to do that
for our fellow human beings, so that we communicated kind
of different levels and in different paces and boil the

(29:42):
stuff down in different ways.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
You use the word optimized. This is a word you
use in your book when you talk about constrained optimization.
I think that's a really interesting subject.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
It is. And so this is that we actually get
the term from engineering, and every engineer knows this that
you don't optimize anything you're building for everything. So we
use the example of a laptop for instance. And so
if you say, okay, what's the best laptop, he said, well,
let's see, it would be the laptop with the biggest screen.
Really okay, so how big ten feet square? Feet Well,

(30:14):
of course not because it's not portable, right, And so
you say, well, okay, the one with the fastest process
are available. Really, that's going to cost several million dollars
and by the way, it's going to be really unstable. Okay,
that's not going to be quite right. Yeah, you know,
how about weight, because if you want a big processor,
it's going to be heavier and hotter and use a
lot a lot more battery power. You can see where

(30:35):
this is going. Of course, the best laptop is going
to be the one that best optimizes all these competing
conditions into this kind of sweet spot. And that's what
if you're designing a bridge, it's the same thing. You're not.
You're designing it for stability over time, but you have
to meet costs, you have to use the materials that
are available. It's that kind of thing, and so people

(30:55):
have to think of that. Okay. Now, if you're building
a planet in which you're going to have all these
different chemical elements and you have sources of energy that
are important from the sun but also deadly right, you
can sort of imagine God the Great engineer, creating a
material universe. They're going to be the even God is
going to have to make these kind of logical trade offs,

(31:17):
and so we should. That's but on the other end,
if the universe is designed for discovery, what we would
find is that these best places that meet the conditions
for life are also going to be the best places overall,
the same way that kind of the best laptop overall
for scientific discovery, that is, for making different kinds of
discoveries that on their own require kind of a different

(31:39):
set of conditions. And so you're trying to solve this
very complex problem.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
An omniscient God would never make the mistake of creating
the human eye. I've heard that argument, because there are
problems with the human eye. But this again goes to
your point of constraint optimization.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Absolutely, And of course this is the story that we
all heard for the longest time, that the human eye
is wired backwards, so there's this hole in it, and
the ideas. Richard Dawkins loves these arguments that, well, you know,
God wouldn't have done anything this way, which is always
interesting that atheists know how God would have done things,
but they're to still in their argument, it's that it

(32:16):
looks like it's poorly engineered, and in every case, you
just have kind of have to look at the details.
And in that case, knowledgeable people have quit using that
argument because it turns out there is a really important
functional reason for it to be wired that way, and
in fact, the so called whole in our visual system
is compensated for in other ways, so it doesn't actually
mess up our vision. Now, of course, the world has fallen,

(32:38):
so we can't always expect things are exactly the way
God designed them originally. Nevertheless, so many of these arguments
fall apart on closer inspection that I'm generally I just
usually treat the prior probability of these claims as pretty low,
a very low chance of it being true, but you
still got to look at the details.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, let's talk about one of the things you write
about in the book, and that solar eclipses. On the
one hand, they're beautiful and they're inspiring. On the other hand,
as you point out, they've played a very significant role
in scientific discovery.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
That's right, And people wonder that's how we open the book.
It's actually the idea of eclipses is what gave us
the idea for the argument. And so just to explain
to people that maybe didn't see the eclipse or I
haven't thought about it. Is that to get a perfect
eclipse like we have on the Earth, you need first
to be all that. You need a sort of platform
that you're on. You need occulting or eclipsing body like

(33:35):
the Moon. You need a light source, which is the Sun,
and then you need them all line up in space
in a straight line. And then if they're going to
have a perfect eclipse, they need to appear the same
size and shape from your vantage point, which is what
we have. Right. That's something that we take for granted,
but we really shouldn't. And so as it happens from
the Earth, the Moon is four hundred times closer than

(33:56):
the Sun. It's also four hundred times smaller than the Sun.
You get this very eering match between the Sun and
the Moon, so that we get these perfect eclipses where
you get this kind of blackness in the sky. Garma
and I saw it this April from Waksahatchie, Texas, right
in the center of the path of fatality. It was
about four and a half minutes. You know, you cannot

(34:18):
look at the Sun with the naked eye, even if
there's a slight bit of the bright photosphere available. But
as soon as the disc of the moon covers the Sun,
you can look at you can look at it directly.
It's like a black pupil with an iris in the sky.
It's absolutely magnificent. And so the question is, okay, well
that's neat, But what does that have to do with
your argument. Well, two of the important things you need

(34:41):
to build a habitable planet. The one big one is
the distance from your host star. So you need to
be where it's not too hot and not too cold,
so called Goldilock zone. So if you're in the Goldilock zone,
that's going to fix the size of the star in
your sky right our sun. Another thing you need is
a large, well placed moon stabilize the tilt of your

(35:01):
planet's axis and to contribute to the tides. And when
you get those two things that are needed for life
to build, two important ingredients for making your plane in habitable,
it sets up the conditions for perfect silar eclipses and
perfect silar eclipses, as you mentioned a minute ago, are
this natural experiment that have allowed us to discover things

(35:23):
about the universe that we would have had a very
hard time discovering otherwise. Let me just give you one
kind of The most intuitive example would be the test
for Einstein's general theory of relativity. So Einstein, when he
developed a special in general theory, a prediction of his theory,
it's fairly arcane for Bible, don't study it, but was

(35:43):
that there's a thing called space time and massive objects.
It's not like gravity is a force of pulling force.
What happens is that space time gets bent by massive bodies,
and then that affects the kind of movement of things
around it. And so a prediction of his theory said, well,
if this is right, as opposed to say, the Newtonian

(36:06):
view of gravity, then what would happen is that when
a kind of directional light passes near the edge of
a massive body, it would appear to move from where
you would expect it to be. So, for instance, if
you were to look at the sun, or you look
at the night sky and you map where the stars
are when the sun's not there, and then you come

(36:27):
back later when the sun is there and you look
at stars that are those same stars passing right near
the edge of the sun. It will look like they've
moved because the light the starlight passing near the edge
of the Sun will be curved, will be bent by
the mass of the Sun. Of course, you can't do
that normally because you can't see the starlight near the
edge of the Sun except during a perfect story eclipse.

(36:49):
And that is exactly what happened during the eclipse of
twenty or nineteen nineteen. Sir Arthur Eddington, a couple of
teams tested this and confirmed Einstein's theory, and astronomers have
continued to do that and to refine it since then.
So really the most important theory of the twentieth century
that we was, at least the most important for understanding
the universe as a whole, was tested and was able

(37:12):
to be tested because of a perfect solar eclipse. And
there's a bunch of other examples, but eclipses. Every astronomer
knows how important eclipses have been for scientific discovery, and
so it's sort of staggering to realize that, Gosh, we
enjoy these things, these amazing things, because of the needs

(37:34):
for life, and when you get those God is God.
I think has set this up so that we also
get access to the universe that we would not have otherwise.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
You know, in some sense, reading the privileged planet twenty
years ago changed the way I look at the world.
You look in the daytime at the sun, Yes, well
there's the sun. Look at night at the moon. You know,
a half moon, maybe's look at it? So what sun moon?
But when you start to see the things like solar eclipses,

(38:08):
well you just mentioned the ratio of size between sun
and moon. Then all of a sudden you recognize the
words of scripture being impactful and true. The heavens declare
the glory of God. The skies proclaimed the work of
his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech, night
after night. They proclaim knowledge. There's no speech or language
where their voices not heard. Their words go out to

(38:29):
the ends of the earth. So you start looking at
the universe differently. And I think that's one of the
great advantages of this book. I mean, it intoxicates you
with the beauty and the glory of God's created handiwork
things that you might never otherwise pay any attention to.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Absolutely. I mean, so eclipses for the lucky people that
are in the path of all during their life, of course,
have been happening for thousands of years, and humans have
been astonished by them. The entire time, but a sort
of understanding about what's required to set it up in
the way in which it connects to the needs for
habitability and discovery. These are all fairly recent discoveries. That's

(39:10):
what's sort of amazing is that people have the Christians
often have the impression that, well, science is overwhelmingly a
hostile to faith, and this is kind of the worst
time to be alive for being a Christian. Well, in
a sense, it's tough, but in another sense, it's probably
the best time. I mean, it was only in the
twentieth century that we had really good empirical evidence that

(39:30):
the universe had a beginning. Before then we believed it
on faith, and maybe there was some philosophical arguments for
the impossibility of infinite regress. But to realize that no,
in fact, the best evidence from the natural world tells
us the universe had a beginning in the finite past.
Christians spend our time arguing about how old it is,
and don't notice that if it's old, if it's any age.

(39:53):
That makes life very hard for the materialist, because no
longer can the material universe be the old time reality
because it had a beginning. That's the era in which
we live.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
And so I.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Honestly think in some ways God left it to this
time for the created order to disclose these things about it.
The psalmist from the beginning, of course, the psalmist Us
you said, he said, the heaven's declared the glory of God.
So it's actively participating in the glory of God. But
there's rich detail and more detail all the way down.

(40:25):
It's like wheels within wheels, or an encrypted message in
which there's one message at one level and then you
magnify it and you find another message. That's what I
think is happening. And I think, look, if we're right,
Garry and I, we found the first couple a dozen
good examples of this. But we think, if we're right,
we'll discover a bunch of other stuff and the pattern
will continue to be confirmed.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
You use so many memorable phrases. One of the phrases
that you use in your talks, in your writing is
the fact that Earth is a data recorder.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yes, yes, and this is another thing that that's our
chapter too. And so we all know that you can
count the age of a tree by reading tree rings
as a kind of rough estimate, right, And so it's
just a kind of an accretion of development with a
tree ringing by you know, cutting at the trunk of

(41:16):
a tree. A few people know that they're ice cores. So,
for instance, there's like Vostok in Antarctica and sites in
Greenland in which you can kind of do the same
thing vertically. You can just drill core and there are
these layers of ice that get more and more compressed,
and based upon the isotope ratiows that correspond to the

(41:39):
sunspot cycles, you can actually date those in these kind
of eleven year increments, and then based upon the materials
that are in those layers and isotope race shows, you
can actually figure out what's happening in the distant past
in terms of temperature, what's happening in terms of the climate,
all sorts of things that you can reconstruct it much
sort of farther back than you could with tree rings

(42:01):
their cores on lake sediments and ocean sediments. There you
can do the same thing with stalagtites and stalagmites. These
are these layering processes that only exist. First of all,
they're all either based upon the hydrological cycle or basic
biological processes needed for life, and yet they're also laying

(42:22):
down a recording of all sorts of things that have
happened in the past, so that we have a much
better and much better understanding of what's happened. We kind
of know that in terms of archaeology, and people might say, okay,
well that's neat. We know maybe a few hundred years
with trees, but you can find you can get information
a lot farther back. And so now remember argument is that, okay,

(42:45):
habitable planets are going to be better at these things
than non habitable planets. Well, guess what if you compare
our planet those layering processes to other planets, they have
nothing like this. They're just not really good data recording
systems like that on planets that are hostile to live.
So it's just yet another example. And so we think, look,

(43:06):
when you walk around and you look at trees, be astounded,
but also realize they're data recorders. They're rolled up scrolls
recording data about what we're doing and what other people
are doing and what the atmosphere is like at this moment.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Let's get into something really controversial climate change. Oh yeah,
how does the privileged planet hypothesis inform the current climate
change debate. I mean, we're talking jay about politicians being
convinced that we need to spend tens, maybe hundreds of

(43:44):
trillions of dollars on climate change, that it's an existential problem,
that's the greatest problem. Kids are afraid. The fear mongering
is intense, but the privileged planet hypothesis actually helps inform
us here.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
It does, and so just for people that only follow superficially,
the client the sort of climate change catastrophised claim is
that our contributions of CO two, in particular into the atmosphere.
CO two is this three auto molecule, and so it's
a greenhouse gas is causing the surface of the planet
to heat up more and far more than it would naturally,

(44:22):
and that's going to lead to catastrophic types of climate that's,
as you said, going to be catastrophic to humans into life.
First thing to note is that there's no justification for
those extreme claims. And so if you even read the
overheated Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change reports from the UN,
none of those never justify this. They'll say, Okay, yeah,

(44:43):
we think, based upon our computer models, that will get
between one and five degrees centigrade warming in the next
one hundred years. There's really not even a justification for that.
But notice that in either of those cases it's not catastrophic.
I mean, anyone living at upper latitudes experience is a
heck of a lot more than five degrees change and
temperature every day. And so the idea that you know

(45:06):
this would somehow lead to the extinction of life is
just nonsense. But then the second question would be, okay,
how sensitive is the climate to additions of CO two?
And the great thing here is that we actually have data,
as I mentioned those recording devices, we have data about
what's happened in the distant past. There are times in

(45:27):
the distant past when the when the atmosphere had vastly,
vastly more carbon dioxide I mean order of magnitude more
carbon dioxide than it does now. There was no run
a runaway greenhouse effect. It was didn't wipe out life.
In fact, plant life really likes carbon dioxide. It's plant food. Ironically,
if you get too low concentration of CO two in

(45:49):
the atmosphere, but low one hundred and fifty parts per million,
plant life ceases. So that's the catastrophe. And so the
fact that our planet actually chords information allows us to
test these predictive computer models. The computer models, remember, are
just the programs on computers and which you plug in

(46:09):
variables based on your assumptions and see what would happen
if your assumptions are true. That have to be tested
against reality. But we already know the climate is not
nearly as sensitive to carbon dioxide as these models predict,
and we know that precisely because the Earth has been
recording this information. Now here's the ironic thing is that
if you think about what's really kind of worrisome in

(46:33):
the distant past climate, it's not warm patches, it's ice ages,
when a huge amount of the Earth is covered in
a couple of miles of eyes. That's the thing we
ought to worry about. And we're actually kind of due
for another ice age. It may be that our contribution
of coe to through industrial processes, while not making all

(46:56):
that much difference in terms of warming, may help helping
stave off another ice age. That's still come an open question,
but we think there's actually some evidence of that. And
so this is obviously sort of directly related to this.
And I can tell you, Hank, I mean Germ and
I started following all this this debate in nineteen ninety
nine when he started on the book. The arguments have
gotten worse and worse and worse on the other side

(47:19):
for catastrophe, And so it makes me really sad that
people don't know enough about the evidence that they just
sort of they believe these hysterical claims.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
So you have someone, and not to pick on any
particular politician, but Joe Biden, he's kind of an easy target. Yeah,
but you hear him talk about this dogmatically. Do you think,
I mean, this is a speculative question. Do you think
he really understands climate change in any comprehensive sense.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
No, I don't think so. In fact, the only you know,
there was a politician in Hoff Center, M. Hoff from
Oklahoma that really followed the science, Al Gore that wrong
about a lot of stuff. At least was kind of
interested in the science. Now. He infamously misinterpreted data from
past climate in which he claimed that you get wherever

(48:10):
you get an increase in CO two, you get an
increase in temperature, and so he was assuming that was
a sort of causal relationship. But he had messed up
the sequence because what actually happens is that you get
the temperature increase about eight hundred years before the CO
two increase, and so he'd actually sort of reversed cause
and effect. And the reason for that is when it's cool,

(48:32):
the ocean can hold more CO two, and when it's
worm it releases it. So even the New York Times
had to correct al Gore on that in his documentary
and Inconvenient Truth, but he followed it. But most politicians
that I've seen don't have any obvious understanding of this
at all. There you know, generally, I assume most of
them are sincere, but they're just listening to their sort

(48:55):
of selected experts. But notice that it's there's a if
you're a politician that wants to increase your power, especially
your power over people's choices and over the economy, climate
change hysteria gives you a justification for that because you say, well, yeah,
all things being equal, people should be free to make
choices about transportation fuel use. But there's this existential threat,

(49:17):
and so for the common good, we're going to have
to tell you exactly what you want to do. That's
the net zero campaign, This idea that we're going to
buy twenty fifty or even twenty thirty contribute no net
carbon emissions, no more CO two to the atmosphere. Well,
this is completely insane. This is never going to happen.
China and India are still developing, They're not going to

(49:39):
quit doing it. And so that's why I think we
should just look at scance at politicians talking about this,
because it's a justification for them to increase their power
over us, even if they're sincere. I think that's basically
what this is about. And very few of them, as
far as I can tell, have actually spend any time
studying the details.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Yeah, so for all of us, many years ago, I
learned from you a particular sequence that will help all
of us. You taught us really how to ask the
right questions and then how to ask the right questions
in the right sequence. So when you're confronted with something
like climate change, you actually know what to do.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
Absolutely. Yeah. And so it says the four questions, which
is probably maybe the thing that I've developed the farthest,
was just these four questions. So somebody says, do you
believe in global warming or climate change? That's actually a
bundle of different claims, you know, sort of put together.
So the question you want to ask is, okay, first,
is it warming? Right? Is the earth warming that? It's

(50:35):
just that straightforward empirical question. Is there a warming trend
if you take some baseline, say eighteen fifty to the present,
that's just what's happening, right, So let's go look at
the evidence. The second question is are we causing it?
That is this human activity the main or primary cause
of it. So that's a separate question, right, that's going
to be the cause something's happening. What's causing it is

(50:58):
a different question. You know, the ice caps could be
melting and polar bearers could be drowning, and that didn't
tell you whether humans are doing anything to it. The
third question is is it bad? That is, let's assume
that the earth's warming, Let's assume humans are causing it.
Is it bad? That is? Is the warming bad? And
is the contribution to CO two to the atmosphere bad.

(51:18):
The only way you could say that warming is bad
is if you knew that the optum what the optimum
global temperature was, That is, what's the optimum average global temperature?
If we knew what that was, and you could, you'd say, okay, well,
are we moving toward it or away from it? Climate
alarmists assume that we're moving away from it, that somehow
it's cooler than it is now, But there's actually no

(51:38):
evidence that that's the case. It could be very well
that the optimum temperature, say for human life or plant life,
is a little warmer than it is now. So that's
at least a debatable question. And then the fourth question is,
let's assume the answer to the first three is yes,
that the earth's warming, We're causing it. It's bad. Would
any of the advice policies make it any difference? And

(52:00):
that's an economic question. It's actually really easy. The Kyoto Protocol,
initially in the nineties we knew, would cost trillions of
dollars and make no difference. The Paris Accords, the UN
Paris Accords, which countries generally did not abide by, cost
a lot and make no difference. That zero would cost
I mean net zero would just basically move us back

(52:23):
to a hunter gatherer stage or something like that. Probably,
so the cost would be immense and it still wouldn't
probably make a difference. And then I've since added a
fifth question, what should we do instead? So in other words,
the policies that are being advised are crazy. What should
we do instead, Well, we know that the wealthier country
is more technologically advanced, the more they're able to adapt

(52:46):
to things. So if whatever happens, right, if we have
an ice age, if we have increased warming, the wealthier
country is the easier it's going to be for them
to adapt to us. So what we should do is
pursue policies, global policies and trade power. It help poor
countries become wealthier so that they can adapt to it
just as well as we can. And the bonus is

(53:07):
that as countries get wealthier, they get more concerned about
environmental issues. And so if you're really poor and you're
using dung for fuel in your hut, you're not concerned
about what parts per million of CO two are in
the atmosphere. But when a country gets wealthy, we start
worrying about things like the purity of the water in
the air. And so I think that's the answer. Whatever

(53:28):
ultimately you think about those questions, what we really should
be doing, if we care about people, is helping the
rest of the world get wealthy.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Yeah, so a couple of things there has to be
a balance here though, right, because we are called to
be good stewards of God's creation. You're not negating that not.
I mean that's an imperative. Absolutely have to be good stewarts.
So yeah, that's fantastic for us to be good stewarts.
But on the other hand, we can't give in to pseudoscience.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
That's right, and this is the I think this is
honestly the reason that Christians get buffaloed by this is
that our our compassion and our are our correct theology
gets weaponized against us. So they say, look, you believe
that we should be stewards of the world. God's you know,
told us to be fruitful and multiply fill the earth,
to till the garden and keep it. And climate change

(54:23):
is the worst environmental disaster and generation. So Christians need
to get on board. That's a that's a kind of
there's some illision there. Logically to be a good steward,
right is in other words, we do need to tend this.
So I would say that's why we should find out
what we're doing right and find out if it's actually
harming things, let's fix it. I just think that the

(54:45):
hysteria about climate change is overblown and based on bad
arguments and bad inferences, and moreover, it tends to suck
the air out of the room when it comes to
real environmental concerns. They're legitimate environmental concerns with respect to talks,
and I'm worry about certain food additives and things that
we have in the water that we're not paying attention to.

(55:05):
We've been good at getting the big toxins out, but
I think there's look, we're doing something to the environment
in our surroundings that to increase massive increase in chronic diseases,
especially among kids, could be an environmental thing. We're not
focusing on that. We're focusing on these kind of things
having to do with climate change that I don't think

(55:27):
are sort of well justified. So if you want to
be a good steward and you want to care about
the environment, the first thing you got to do is
be discerning so that you can focus on things that
actually help and not focus on things that actually hurt.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Yeah, discernment. You know there's another thing that comes to mind,
and you do write about this in your book as well, earthquakes,
And I'm thinking about not only earthquakes but hurricanes. I
mean We've just had two incredibly catastrophic hurricanes, and a
lot of people will say, look, earthquakes, hurricanes are all
signs that we're in a global warming catastrophe. The earthquakes

(56:04):
are more frequent and more powerful, the hurricanes are more frequent,
more powerful, et cetera. A lot of that is based
on misinformation, isn't.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
It it is? I mean, it's so strange, and so
people will they'll think, for instance, of comparison, if you're
to do sort of property damage in Florida in twenty
twenty four from a hurricane compared to property damage in
seventeen hundred, well, there's almost no property damage in seventeen hundred,
not because there's no hurricanes, because nobody was building stuff there, right,
and so you're not comparing apples and apples. So the

(56:33):
relevant question is, Okay, if warming is causing an increase
in intensity of hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, let's look at the evidence.
Anyone can do this, you can go online. There's absolutely
no trend. There is no trend of increasing frequency of
increasing intensity of hurricanes or tornadoes. In fact, weirdly, on

(56:53):
some measures, there seems to be kind of a declining
trend the problem is is that every hurricane in every
torne is used as an example of climate change, and
so that people come to interpret these events with that
kind of framework forgetting that, Okay, there've always been hurricanes,
So the only way to test that claim would be
to look and see if there's a trend line of

(57:15):
increasing intensity and deadliness, and there just isn't one. So
there's no reason to think that that's the case. Moreover,
even though the kind of climate change theory is that
the warming is going to happen primarily at the poles
and not at the equator, and it's actually the difference
between the temperature difference between the equatorial regions and the
poles that give rise to hurricanes. So if anything just

(57:37):
on the theory itself, you'd expect hurricane intensity to decrease.
But there's a kind of there's just a rhetorical need
for this, and so I always say, you know, when
when a cold thing happens, that's weather. When a hot
thing happens, that's climate change. And you know, they just
count on everyone. If we have a year that happens
to have low hurricane frequency, there nobody's going to talk

(58:00):
about it. If we have a year like this in
which you have a couple of really bad ones, it's
going to be all climate change all the time, right,
But well, they're they're giving us an interpretive framework so
that we will see these things as sign of the theory,
when in fact that that's not how you would do this.
These are just individual data points.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
And I'm going to talk about some other very interesting
thing in chapter four of your book. It's titled Peering Up,
and you talk about the transparent atmosphere and you talk
about it as one of the most eerie coincidences known
to science. So you put a great deal of emphasis
on this, and I want you to impact that for
a moment absolutely.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
And so it's important to realize that just not, not
any part of the electromagnetic spectrum would be useful for
chemical life. And so like people would say, well, okay,
if you know you're around a planet in which you
didn't get visible light on the surface, but maybe you
got X ray or microwave light, then life would just
evolve to use that that part of the electromagneticsctrum. Now

(59:00):
that just misunderstands the kind of basic needs for life
in this universe. It needs to be based on carbon.
Carbon is the element that is what's called metastable, so
it's it's stable enough that you can build three dimensional
complex molecules like proteins, you can code information and DNA,
but not so stable that it doesn't undergo chemical reactions.

(59:22):
So it's this kind of sweet spot. So you need
if you're gonna have life in the universe, information bearing life,
it's going to be based on carbon, and then you're
going to need a solvent for it where these reactions
can take place. Well, that's water, So water and carbon
are perfectly suited to each other. Carbon chemistry is most
reactive over this narrow range of temperatures over which water

(59:42):
is liquid, and it's the same kind of thing. In
the electromagnetic spectrum, there gonna be certain types of electron
of energy. Think of it that way, so of energy
from a star that that life will find useful in
some that it's not useful or as deadly. All right,
So our atmosphere, which is another kind of feature of

(01:00:03):
the same life, is going to need a nitrogen and
auxygen rich atmosphere. There's lots of choices. They're not all
like that. That's of course what we have nitrogen auctiongen
rich atmosphere is what's needed chemically for these life forms.
It also happens to be transparent to the visible part
of the electromagnetic spectrum, so that that part of the

(01:00:25):
spectrum that's needed for life gets through the atmosphere to
the surface. But the atmosphere is not transparent to other
parts of the spectrum. And because of the magnetic field
we have around the Earth, a lot of the kind
of deadly stuff that we might otherwise encounter is blocked.
Now that's interesting because you could ask this other question.

(01:00:46):
So if you were to look at the electromagnetic spectrum,
you've got the short wavelenks or gammin x ray on
one end, and then you get radio waves on the other.
It just means the wave links are really really large.
And then think of the visible light. Is that light
that's you know we think I was when we put
it through a prism, is in a rainbow? That is
a really really tiny slice of the range of the

(01:01:08):
electromagnetic spectrum in the universe. Now ask yourself the question,
if you had access to only like a little sliver
of that for discovering the universe, which liver would you
want have access to Well, it turns out kind of
the most information rich part of the stuff that you
want is in the visible part of the spectrum. So
for life, you need an atmosphere that has the right

(01:01:31):
kind of chemical elements, that constituents of chemical elements, allows
the right kind of energy to come from your host star.
And that's the same little part of the spectrum that's
the most informative for doing science. That's just crazy, I mean,
and so we're talking that the numbers are silks are
mind boggling that when you realize this, you think, well,

(01:01:53):
it is either the eeriest thing I've ever seen or
there's some kind of trick, but it really is just
absolutely wild. And one final thing on this hank because
you might say, okay, yeah, but okay, if that's really useful,
then of course you're gonna want to be able to
see as well as you can. But of course we
get clouds in our atmosphere. So sometimes you live in

(01:02:13):
Seattle probably never seen the Aurora borealis, for instance, because
it's cloudy. Well remember we were talking about the constrained
optimization a few minutes ago. As it happens, Yeah, you
want to have a clear atmosphere for seeing the planets
around the Sun and to be able to look at
the Moon and to see the distant galaxies with the telescope.
So you need a clear atmosphere, but you don't want

(01:02:35):
a perfectly clear atmosphere in the sense that it's totally dry,
because there's a whole other set of things that you
need to discover that require a hydrological cycle. There are
car water in the atmosphere. One of those things is rainbows.
You only get a rainbow if you have water that
has water droplets. It just the right size to be
able to refract the visible light into the rainbow, which

(01:02:59):
was actually crucial for scientific discovery. And so really what
you want is a partly cloudy atmosphere for doing all
of these things. And so you know, that's sort of
counterintuitive because people think, well, yeah, what about clouds. Actually
those are really useful. So even though it can be
frustrating if you've got a you know, a sky viewing
night and it gets cloudy, overall, for science, this is

(01:03:22):
exactly what you would want. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
You mentioned some things in this discussion so far that
I think are either elements that are underappreciated or elements
that get a bad rap. For example, you just mentioned
water underappreciated carbon dioxide I think gets a bad rap.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Yes, absolutely it does. I mean water is crazy. It's
got all these weird and almost properties. So for instance,
it's lighter when it's frozen, so in its solid state
is lighter than in its liquid state. Almost every other
thing that you can think of, every compound and every element,
that's not how it works. But this is why water
is so uniquely suited for life. And so one example

(01:04:09):
of this, so you get freezing, you get the oceans
that freeze on the poles. Well, if ice didn't float,
if it's sunk, that ice would freeze up, it would
sink to the bottom of the ocean. It'd be out
of access to the sun the energy from the sun,
and so more would freeze and it would keep sinking,
and you'd end up with this kind of almost entirely
frozen ocean. As it is, the surface freezes and it

(01:04:32):
insulates the water underneath it. So that's true. The kind
of fact that ice floats ends up being imported at
the planetary level for other reasons. It's important for plant
life and cellular life, and so water is this, even
though it's just you know, a couple of atoms of
hydrogen and an atom of oxygen. It's crazy when it
comes to its fitness for life and the carbon dioxide also,

(01:04:56):
I mean, we treat it as if it's a pollutant. Well,
guess what. Plants take harb monoxide and they should they
use it, right, it's a part of their life cycle.
And then they give us the oxygen. So it's really
wild that this trace, this trace compound, this trace molecule
that's in our atmosphere that is the result both of
respiration of animal life but also plant food and the

(01:05:19):
result of industrial activity, should some somehow be treated as
if it's an environmental toxin, which it just absolutely is not.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
This is off the wall. But should we all be
driving electric cars?

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
I mean yeah, like if you were in It's funny
you say this because I actually really wanted to get
a Tesla, like a not a new car, but a
slightly used car but every ten years. And in DC
the Tesla is ideal because it's like a thirty thirty
mile commute. They don't go anywhere else and you get
all sorts of benefits. In fact, my neighborhood has a

(01:05:52):
free hook up out here, I could get free power.
The problem is is that if everybody were doing that,
we don't have enough copper wire. We simply don't have
the capacity and the grid for everybody to be able
to do that. So even if you thought for various reasons, yeah,
it makes sense to have electric cars so we're not
hauling heavy fuel around with us, we don't have the
capacity to do this. In order to do it. To

(01:06:14):
build these batteries, we are relying on rare earth minerals
from places like China, which have terrible environmental records. And
for me, if anyone is really serious about converting from
internal combustion engines to electric cars, the only way that's
ever at all realistic or that we're even going to
increase the kind of percentage of electric cars is to

(01:06:37):
increase the power of the grid. And the only way
to do that without increasing the use of fossil fuel
for the power plants would be nuclear power. And yet
a lot of the same people don't want to do that.
So I think it's I don't know what they imagine
that composts and some windmills and some solar power is
somehow going to do this, there's just basic physics preventing that.

(01:06:59):
So yeah, I suspect we could be one or two
battery innovations away from making set more sense to use
battery powered cars, but we want to follow market dynamics
on that. The reason almost everyone's still driving the internal
combustion engines is because at the moment, it's the most abundant,

(01:07:19):
least expensive fuel for those purposes for most people. That's
the reason. It's not because people hate the Earth. It's
because it's still, all things being equal, took at the
best fuel to use.

Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
I always say, contrast is the conduit to clarity. And
in chapter five of your book you talk about the
pale blue dot. So here's my question, how does Earth
and our Solar system compare with the thus discovered the
planets and the exoplanets that we have discovered thus far.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
That's right. So when we first wrote the book in
two thousand and four, they were about one hundred exl
planets that we had detected. It's now I think over
five thousand.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
That one more time. Twenty years ago we knew about
one hundred one hundred, now five thousand or more high thousand.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
That's right, And so we're getting better and better. We
still can't quite detect Earth's size planets because they perturb
their stars so little. So the first ones we detected
because we're seeing the planets themselves. What we're seeing is
the effect of the planets on the sort of the
gravitational interactions of the planets or the transit of the

(01:08:28):
planet in front of the star along our line of sight.
So you can detect either kind of a slight dip
in the light, or we can we have instruments to
be able to detect slight wobbles in the star, and
then you can sort of infer the orbit and the
size of the planet basically, And so we now know, yeah,
there's lots of planets around other stars. When the book

(01:08:49):
first came out, I can tell you think every NASA
press release would talk about it extrasolar planet, the most
earthlike planet ever discovered. And we look at it and
it would be something like Jupiter, except it would be
in this wildly elliptical orbit, in most half spinning most
of its life inside the orbit of mercury. Right, So
a hot Jupiter completely useless to life. And if there

(01:09:11):
were an earth like planet in that system, it would
have gotten destroyed by that planet. And so we had
this happen so much that I finally started telling reporters, look,
call us when you find an earth like planet that
is as earth like as Mars, because Mars is the
most earth like planet yet known other than Earth. It
is around the star, so we know it's an in

(01:09:32):
habitable system. It's roughly the same kind of size and
mass as the Earth, it has some of the same elements,
it's only slightly outside the orbit of the Earth. It
could even exchange material with the Earth. And yet it's
utterly lifeless. And so that tells you basically, Venus just
on the inside of our orbit and Mars on the outside,

(01:09:52):
tells you how narrow the conditions are for an earth
like planet, even in an otherwise harable system. They're totally lifeless.
And then of course nobody expects to find life around,
you know, in saying Jupiter or Saturn, which are gas
giants so they don't have stable surfaces, or the outer
gas or ice giants Nupiter and Uranus. What we're doing
now is we're looking at some of the moons. So

(01:10:14):
we have just NASA has just sent a mission. It's
just taken off to look at Europa, which is a
moon around Jupiter. It's a very interesting moon. We spend
a bunch of time talking about Europa in the book,
and so what's interesting about it is that has this
solid ice surface, and so as we said, ice floats,
so maybe there's a liquid ocean just underneath it, and

(01:10:37):
maybe there's life inside there. Well that's basically saying, Okay,
we know life's important, so any place or water is
important for life. So any place we can find water,
we'll have life. Well, we're getting ready to test that
by going to Europa, and we think, sorry, you need
a heck of a lot more. But in some ways
like that shows you how much we've downgraded things in
the twentieth century. In the thirties, Americans panic over orson

(01:11:00):
Well's radio program War in the Worlds because they mistook
it for an actual newscast about Martians invading Earth. Well,
no one would fall for that. Now we know that
there are no Martians because we've actually been there and
can see it. And so now what we're doing is
we're looking for evidence of liquid water in the distant
past on Mars, and we're sending billion dollar probes to

(01:11:22):
Europa in a moon around Jupiter. So that in many ways,
that's the trend line that we've seen from imagining everything
we see from the Moon to Mars has life on it,
to realizing, okay, well let's at least try to see
if there's water somewhere. The reality is five thousand extra
solar planets. Not one of those is even as earthlike

(01:11:44):
as Mars, and so not one of them is likely
to have life on it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:48):
Your book is titled Privileged Planet, and I want to
focus on that word planet for just a moment, because
planets play an incredible role in our existence and survival.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
Yeah, they do. I mean, of course astrologers. This was
the astrological claim, is that the sort of location of
planet planet, by the way, is based on where that
she means wanderers. So they people that are accustomed to
seeing the night sky like the ancients would have been,
would notice that this background of stars that stays more
or less the same the pattern, and then you get

(01:12:20):
these wanderers in the foreground, which we call the they
called the planets. And astrologers would say, well, if you
were born under Jupiter and Jupiter is in a particular constellation,
that supposedly sort of said something about your destiny, and
I don't think there's really anything to that at all. Nevertheless,
the planets do play or all in our existence, and
you can think of it as Jupiter and Saturn are

(01:12:44):
like giant guardians of the inner part of the Solar System.
Because our Solar system is not just the Sun and
eight or nine moons or planets if you count nine,
if you count Pluto. It's also populated by billions or
trillions of commets in the outer part of the Solar
System that spend most of their time way out in
the outer reaches, but every so often they're still gravitationally

(01:13:07):
connected to the Sun, and so they will eventually come
into the interpolar Solar System to our neighborhood. Well now,
comments if you encounter a large comet and you're a
planet with life on it, that's a negative encounter. They
can sterilize life. But because we have these giant plants
in our part of the Solar system, they end up

(01:13:28):
taking a lot of hits for us, so they actually
protect the inner part of the Solar System and make
it much more habitable. So we think you need more
than just the right kind of Sun and the right
kind of planet by itself, you probably need a system
very much like the one that we have now the moment,
we're fairly confident that Jupiter and Saturn play a role

(01:13:48):
in our existence. We like to, you know, find evidence that,
in fact the other planets also play a role. But
at the moment, you know, it's like we focus on
the things that we know at this point, and so
you know, I can't say one way or the other
what role, say, Mercury would play. But we do know
that at least the large planets in the outer part

(01:14:09):
of the Solar System make the inner part of the
Solar System, where we are much more habitable.

Speaker 1 (01:14:15):
What happens to you to your temperature level when you
hear someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about the Sun.
You just mentioned the Sun and say the sun. He
appends the word mediocre to sun. Yeah, so the Sun
is just mediocre. What happens to your temperature when you
hear that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
I'm trying to work on my temperature actually, so that
I just say, well, what is mediocre exactly? And so
presumably mediocre just means some average or something like that,
And so I guess maybe he's saying in terms of
size maybe or something. It's sort of it's not a
tiny star like an M dwarf, but it's not a
blue super giant or something. I don't know because you'd say, okay, well,

(01:14:58):
if we're gonna grade star ours with respect to mediocrity
and grandiosity, how are you going to grade them? Well,
it's not gonna be size, is it, or something like that.
It's gonna be like, Okay, which ones are most conducive
to life in a planetary environment? That is, which ones
are the best host in a planetary system for a

(01:15:18):
life giving planet. Well, it's ours. It's precisely yellow dwarf
like the one that we have. It's very stable. All
stars are slightly variable, But what you don't want is
a star that's just constantly varying its output of energy.
You need stability so that if you have a planet
around a fairly circular orbit, you know it's gonna get

(01:15:40):
roughly the same amount of energy over long periods of time,
and it's actually to be just the right size. So
if it's too small, like a red giant, which is
really what that's Those are the mediocre stars that are
that are just all over the place. To be in
the Goldilocks zone around a red dwarf, you have to
be the planet has to be much much, much closer,
and because of the inverse square love of gravity, the

(01:16:02):
closer you get, the more kind of intense that the
gravitational attraction is. So you get in the Goldilocks zone
around the red dwarf. What's going to happen over time
is that your planet's not going to be able to
orbit on its axis like ours does. It's going to
get locked in. It's golled tidally locked where the same
part of one face surface of the planet faces the

(01:16:23):
Sun during its entire year, and so you're gonna get
it one hot side and one side that's frozen solid,
and so it's going to be almost certainly lifeless or
at least hostile to life. If the star is too large,
it's going to give off all sorts of sterilizing radiation. Also,
if you're too close around the red dwarf, you're gonna
get solar flares are going to affect your planet. So

(01:16:44):
there's just so many details to go into, but the
gist of it is that you need a lot of
stuff to go right. In terms of the composition and
the size and the status of the star where it
is is it by itself? And once you add all
those things up, if we say, okay, the most significant
star is going to be the one, the one that's

(01:17:04):
most the best hostess for life, that's our Sun, it's
going to be small yellow doors that are by themselves
in the right neighborhood within a galaxy. And so it's
very hard to justify the claim that our son is
mediocre unless you're just sort of I don't know, adding
them up by sort of lining them up by size

(01:17:27):
or something and then saying, well, the Sun is kind
of in the middle. I mean, it's like the only
sense I can even make of that claim.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
You've already sort of talked about this, but I think
it bears emphasis, and that is our place in the
Milky Way galaxy. How significant is the precise placement of
the pale blue dot or Earth in the flat and
spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
It's really important. I Mean. The first thing is you
got to be the right kind of galaxy, So you
could be in a galaxy that doesn't have any lot
of heavy elements in it, or that has very erratic
and irregular orbits. So you don't want a large spiral
galaxy like we have. But as I mentioned earlier in
our conversation, the center of the galaxy is hostile to

(01:18:14):
life because of it's much denser, with stars, black holes
sterilizing radiation. So you don't want to be anywhere near that.
But you don't want to be too far from the
center of the galaxy or you end up with basically
a lot of hydrogen and helium, and so you can't
build rocky planets. And then you don't want to be
in the spiral arms, and so you want to be
basically midway out or twenty seven thousand light years from

(01:18:36):
the center to the edge of the galaxy. So it's
roughly the galaxy if you think of it, from edge
to edge, is about one hundred thousand light years across,
and so that's exactly where we are. It's like a
dotted line around the galaxy, not including the spiral arms.
But now then the second question would be, Okay, so

(01:18:56):
if you only pick one place for doing science, where
would that be. Well, even if you could exist in
the center of the galaxy, you would not want to
be there because if you're in the center of the galaxy,
you couldn't tell whether a source of radiation wouldn't be
obvious if it was coming from nearby, from inside your
galaxy or from another galaxy, or from the background radiation,

(01:19:17):
because they'd be the symmetrical on your sky. So everywhere
you pointed, you know, your radio telescope, it would sort
of look the same as it is because we're we're
you know, halfway out. The galaxy appears asymmetrical across our sky.
So if you know, if you go up the Colorado
Springs at night or someplace up on a mountain, you'll

(01:19:38):
see that milky way band across the sky. You're looking
edge on at the thickness of the galaxy to the
density of the stars. Well, that's how it is. In
the radio part of the spectrum too, you're going to
notice that, and so you'd say, okay, that's coming from
the galaxy, so that's nearby. What's this weird radiation that
we're getting uniformly in every direction and the microwave part

(01:20:00):
the spectrum, that's the cosmic background radiation. So it actually
been hard to detect that if we'd been in the
center of the galaxy even if you could have existed there.
And of course, if you're in a murky part of
the galaxy, you might not even be able to see
the planets in your own system. You certainly wouldn't be
able to see stars, and you certainly wouldn't be able
to see galaxies outside the galaxy. So long, in the

(01:20:21):
short of it is, if you could pick one place
in the galaxy for doing science, it's in the Galactic
capital Zone. In other words, in that part of the galaxy,
that's the best place for life itself.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
Another interesting thing, and I think you point this out
in your book as well. That's probably where I got
this from. But there's a lot of talk on the
Internet about how telescopes have undermined Big Bang cosmology.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
Yeah, and I don't sorget this because there's always a
kind of skepticism because of the James Web Space Telescope,
because what it's allowing us to do is basically mind listeners.
So when you're looking into the distant universe, you're not
looking at it at something at this moment because light

(01:21:09):
has a finite speed, and so what you're seeing is
you're sort of sampling different time periods in the universe.
And so because the universe is large, we're able to
visually sample different time periods. James Web allows us to
sort of reach farther back. And so lots of cosmologists
had these models of galactic evolution, as it's called in

(01:21:32):
cosmic evolution, in which the models assumed, okay, how long
did it take from the Big Bang and the decoupling
and the sort of formation of elements in order for
us to get galaxies like we see now. And the
assumption was that it takes a really long time to
get that. And so then all of a sudden, we're
discovering what we're considered to be mature galaxies. And so

(01:21:54):
some people say, oh, that totally undermines the evidence of
a big bang, that is the evidence of the five
Night passed. No, not at all. What it undermines is
these models. It just it looks like, gosh, things had
to be really fine tuned beyond what we thought. Because
it's surprising how quickly you can get galaxy formation once

(01:22:16):
you get the elements in place. It's sort of like
finding life on Earth almost as soon as life could exist, Right,
That tells you something. And so people in some ways
they were so attached to their theoretical models of how
this was supposed to have happened, that when we finally
get some direct evidence of it, it's like they get
totally skeptical and said they need to go back to

(01:22:37):
the drawing board, because clearly they got something wrong about
what happens when galaxies form early in the history of
the universe.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
I want to ask you a question that one of
my grandkids might ask me. They might say something like,
why is the night sky dark? Papa? But that's something
you addressed your.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Book absolutely, and it's called Ober's paradox. This was some
you know, I said earlier that we just in the
twentieth century finally have empirical evidence that the universe had
a beginning because of the cosmic background radiation, the cosmic expansion.
In fact, we've always had evidence of that. The fact
that the night sky is dark, it means that the
universe is not infinite in expanse, and it hasn't always

(01:23:18):
been like this, Because if the universe had always been
like this same basic kind of density, and they're an
infinite number of stars, then at every point from an
infinite amount of time ago, there should have been a
star pointing in our direction, and so the night stock
sky should not be the night sky. It should be
as bright as the surface of the sun. The fact
that it's dark is itself evidence that the universe is

(01:23:41):
not infinite, either in space or in time, which is
a really remarkable thing. The other thing is that it's
only because of the night sky that we're actually able
to see a lot of stuff. You can't see distant
stars and things like that during the day, and so
the evidence was always there. It was called Ober's paradox, though, Hank,
because it's only a paradox if you assume the universe

(01:24:02):
is eternal and infinite. If it's not, it's not a paradox.
You said, well, yeah, of course maybe this. Yeah, the
night the sky is dark. I guess the universe that
must not be eternal. That would have been the kind
of more natural inference.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):
Wow, good answer. And you know, one of the things
that you point out in your book, and I mean
maybe this is as basic, not in the sense of unimportant,
but basic and important, is that our universe is fine
tuned for not only discovery, but for the existence of

(01:24:35):
life itself.

Speaker 2 (01:24:37):
That's right, And so everything we've talked about so far
is like think of it as the fine tuning of
the stuff you need to get right at the local level.
But then you have the question, okay, well, what about
the universal properties of the universe, the stuff that's true
everywhere that govern the structure of molecules and the elements
and planets, and so there's sort of basically three of
these kind of universal properties. So there's the initial conditions.

(01:25:02):
So what that would be is, okay, how did things
have to be set up right at the beginning in
order to have a universe like we have now. Then
there are the laws, so like the law of gravity
that people will learn in physics, and then within the laws,
they're these sort of variables that might be M or
C or something in their constants, and so these are

(01:25:24):
their constant. What that means is there's literally constant the
same everywhere, and so these kind of mathematical properties of
the universe that are true absolutely everywhere. Well, physicists in
the nineteen fifties started realizing, okay, so you've got the
gravitational force constant, so that's that kind of big force.
You've got electromagnetic and the strong and the weak nuclear forces.

(01:25:46):
So these are called the four fundamental forces. This is
where it was first noticed, and some physicists said, you know,
it's weird because if you fiddled with the electromagnetic constant
and made it different, or you fiddled with the gravitational
force constant, you wouldn't I get a universe that had
life in it. In fact, you probably wouldn't get a
universe that had planets or galaxies. As it happens, it's

(01:26:07):
like these constants are very precisely tuned for the existence
of life. In fact, it's called the fine tuning problem. Well,
it's only a problem if you don't really like the
idea that the universe having been fine tuned. But if
you just let's just say, okay, if it quacks like
a duck, it looks like a duck, maybe it's a duck.
If the universe looks fine tuned, maybe it is. If
it looks fine tuned for life, maybe it is. And

(01:26:30):
that's that's again, a basic discovery of twentieth century physics
that confirms the theistic worldview. Lots of physicists have spent
decades trying to find loopholes to get around it. But
it's an extraordinary thing, and it's strong enough that it
actually has led some atheists just itself, Like the late

(01:26:50):
Anthony flu was persuaded by the fine tuning and the
evidence for design and DNA to move from atheism to
deism and hen keep it. Even my debate way back
in two thousand and eight when I debated the late
new atheist Christopher Hitchens at Stanford, was about God and science,
and he ended up pivoting to deism right because he realized, Okay,

(01:27:12):
that does the argument for fine tuning does sound like
there's some purpose in the universe. So we said, yeah,
maybe deism is true, but God doesn't care anything about us,
which I thought was kind of an interesting concession. It's
really not a good time to be an atheist if
you are honest with the evidence from physics and cosmology.

Speaker 1 (01:27:30):
Yeah, you know, I want to read a quote from
your book that caught my attention. I wrote it down
here on a piece of paper. But this in the
context of features of our universe that allow us to
discover the laws of nature. You say, the universe is
an excellent tutor. It has not been so demanding as
to ensure failure, but instead has presented us with worthy

(01:27:54):
challenges that we can meet with diligence. And when I
read that, I immediately thought of Proverbs after twenty five,
verse two. It is the glory of God to conceal
a matter. It is the glory of God's people to
search out a matter.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Yes, absolutely, I mean, and we've known that. I mean,
anyone that studies scripture like you have for a lifetime.
You can read Genesis one and a seven. You can
read Genesis one to a seven year old. It's sort
of simple and easy to get and it's it's bottomless
though the text when you especially get into the Hebrew.
That's how the created order is. And we were talking

(01:28:34):
there specifically about the way in which, okay, if you
had to go from say a hunter gatherer stage when
you don't have a written language, and to figure anything
out scientifically, you needed Einstein's general theory of relative but
either's like there's no way to get there from here, right,
But as it happens, it's like the world has been
set up so that fairly difficult, it takes work, but

(01:28:57):
we're able to figure things out. And then from each
theoretical stage helped us to understand some things, and then
it gave us a platform to discover the next stage.
So you needed Kepler to get Newton, and you needed
Newton to get Einstein. And if you had to go
straight to Einstein without the intermediate steps, you wouldn't have

(01:29:19):
gotten there theoretically. And that was something that honestly, we
kind of realized late in the book, this this stare
stepping of physical discoveries and the theoretical discoveries. And then
Christian philosoper Robin Collins has actually has developed this more
beyond what we did in terms of the kind of
the theoretical stare stepping in which God has set stuff
up so that if we're diligent, we can discover these things.

(01:29:43):
But it's still a worthy enterprise. It's not like some
kind of fake game that you know, a parent will
give to their six year old so that they're sure
to win. It's something that is a genuine accomplishment when
we discover these things.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
We heard this little phrase over and over again and
various con Tex size matters comment on size is our
mark of smallness, a symptom of disrepute. Is our puny
size in comparison to the universe, something that denigrates the
greatness of Earth.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
I don't know why. I mean clearly that it would
the fact that you know, let's say a star, just
a big lump of a giant lump of hydrogen gas
or something that's a light you're cross. Okay, spatially, that's
huge compared to the Earth or compared to an individual
human being. But surely a single human being is much

(01:30:37):
more magnificent than just this kind of clown of hydrogen.
So size is not especially good measure in the abstract
for significance. But as I mentioned earlier, and we actually
do the calculation in the book, that the irony is
that on a kind of logarithmic scale, the Earth, the
sort of human Earth size scale, is actually in the

(01:31:00):
middle of size scales that we know in the universe.
So if you think of the universe as a whole
as the big scale, and you go all the way
down to say quarks on the small scale, the human
Earth size scales in the middle, which is interesting. So
we're not tiny and we're not huge, but that's where
you'd want to be for scientific discovery. As it happened.
So if we were just to say an order of

(01:31:20):
magnitude smaller or the size of ants, most of the
universe would have been inaccessible to us. They're kind of
just basic physical dynamics in terms of the kind of
instruments you'd need, what you'd need to be able to
control fire, the size of lenses you'd need for telescopes,
these kinds of things. In order to see large structures,

(01:31:41):
you need to be about our size scale. On the
other hand, if we were much larger, it would have
been very hard for us to detect things at a
very small scale. So for scientific discovery, we're actually right
in the sweet spot, but it would be really easy
to miss that if you somehow thought are middling size
is compared to a blue super giant, somehow made us unimportant.

Speaker 1 (01:32:04):
Is that constrained to optimization again, because one of the
points you make in the book is that our size
is perfect for the adaptation of technology.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):
That's right, it's absolutely constrained optimization. And our friend and
colleague Michael Denton has actually taken this farther. In fact,
he has a series Discovery Institute, Press and Privileged Species,
the kind of technological stuff which we talk a bit
about in the book. But so much of technology depends
upon our ability to control fire, and you know, look

(01:32:37):
ants can't control fire because of their side. So there's
this is kind of weird interlocking features of this thing.
When you really start analyzing it, they get, as you said, eerie.
And people that get the argument, Hank like really early on.
I think the first time, the first times we even
presented this stuff, your most spoke at a conference feeling

(01:32:58):
It's around two thousand or two thousand and one at Yale.
I was there and a guy named Scott Minnick at
the University of Idaho. It was there, and he heard
our discussion about eclipses. It kept him awake all night.
I mean, but this is a smart guy, a scientist
who he got it right away and he started running
out the implications of this in his mind. He thought
this was the eeriest thing I'd ever heard, just ear

(01:33:20):
in the sense of like a wow, this is like
a cosmic conspiracy that I didn't know anything about, which
we think that's actually the right response.

Speaker 1 (01:33:30):
Well, this discussion wouldn't be complete if we didn't talk
about the Copernican principle. You know, it's a myth, and
like all great myths, it's a mixture of truth and falsehood.
And you go through in your book why this myth
is perpetuated, and how we can actually defend the truth

(01:33:51):
in light of this mythology.

Speaker 2 (01:33:54):
Absolutely, and so of course it's called the Copernican principle.
So you'd think, okay, well, it's based on Copernicus Pernicus
is the scientists who wrote the book on the Revolution
of the Heavenly Spheres at fifteen forty three, in which
you proposed kind of mathematically that, in fact, you can
you understand the movement of the Moon and the Sun
and the planets better if you think of the Earth

(01:34:16):
as another one of the planets, with the Moon rotating
around us and the Earth rotating on its axis and
the movement of the Sun, then it's just merely apparent,
whereas we're one of the planets that's actually orbiting the Sun.
And he said, actually, this makes the movements make more
sense than the previous idea, the pre Copernican idea called
the Aristotelian Ptolemaic view, which is that the Earth is

(01:34:40):
this sort of stationary center and all the other everything
else that we see literally kind of goes around us.
And so the Copernican principle, the myth is that, well,
what Copernicus discovered is that we're not in the center.
That is, we're not in the important part of the universe.
We're just a mere planet. And so what Copernicus did
passed us into this position of mediocrity. Science has continued

(01:35:04):
for several centuries. Every new scientific discovery just relegates us
to a less and less important place. Okay, so that's
the myth, But if you actually look at the history
of science, that story appears in the nineteenth century, not
in the fifteen hundreds or the sixteen hundreds. The reason
is because it completely gets the details wrong about what

(01:35:25):
the pre Copernican cosmology was. Anybody that knows Aristotle is
going to know that Aristotle's physics, the Earth wasn't in
the center because that was the important place to be.
It's because it's one of the elements. It's the heavy element.
That's where stuff falls, and so you're going to get
the heavy Earth in the center. It's really the bottom
of the universe. But it's also where death and decay are.

(01:35:46):
It's where the detritus of the universe collects. The really
important stuff is in the moon and above. It's made
of this quintessence of this fifth element, of this kind
of perfect eternal, immune, suitable matter that's separate from the earth.
And so it wasn't that the center was a sort

(01:36:07):
of position of pride of place. And then if you
take Dante's Christian interpretation of that, you read the Divine Comedy,
the surface of the earth is where humans live. We
can die, right, and we can ascend to the heavens,
but we might also we might go to hell. And
if you're reading the Divine Comedy and you get to Hell, well,
the center of the universe, the center of the earth,

(01:36:27):
that's satan, right, that's the real that's the center of
the universe. And the kind of Christianized pre Copernican cosmology.
So in other words, the center of the universe Forkernicus
was not the most important place to be. And it's
only by reinterpreting that and counting on people not to
understand the history that they could think that, oh, and

(01:36:48):
Copernicus told us we weren't in the center of the universe,
that meant we were or were unimportant. It's a terrible
kind of bungling of the details of science. C. S.
Lewis wrote a wonderful books bribing all this, called the
discarded image. And so if you read Copernicus, and then
later Galileo. Galileo actually says, you know, he thinks being
a planet, we're reflecting the light of the Sun and

(01:37:12):
that that's a kind of glorious thing. And then Kepler
realized later that actually, because we move, then we're not stationary.
There will be a way for us to figure out
the distances to some stars using a parallax measurement in trigonometry,
which we actually did, so we're able to measure the
distances to some stars just based upon their slight movement

(01:37:35):
six months later. So we're on one side of the
Earth or the Sun, and we measure a star where
it is on the sky, and then measure it again
six months later when you're on the other side of
the Sun, and if there's a slight variation, with some trigonometry,
you can figure out how far way that star is.
So there's so much wrong with the Copernican myth. Nothing

(01:37:56):
wrong with Copernicus in what he discovered, but he did
not show us that we were in magnificant by moving
us from the so called center, and there's nothing of
the actual discoveries of science have not done that either. Yeah,
the universe is a lot larger than maybe we imagined
or realized. But that doesn't answer the question that we're
most interested in, which is the significance of us here

(01:38:21):
both as creatures, living creatures, but also as discoverers. If
you ask the question the right way, you get a
very different answer.

Speaker 1 (01:38:28):
Yeah, I mean this is very important to you devoted
chapter twelve and thirteen to eight principles that discredit this
idea of mediocrity. But you also mentioned something, and I
want you to make a pitch here if you would.
You mentioned something a number of times throughout the podcast,
and it was if you read, if you read this,

(01:38:49):
if you read that, if you read this, make a
pitch for reading again in our generation. Do you think
that's even possible.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
It's certainly possible. And I'm you know, I'm optimistic about
the fact what I have seen. And so, just as
the education system generally keeps getting worse and worse and
worse and worse, there's also pockets of light. I mean,
they're amazing private schools, there are homeschool co ops that
we've been part of. The classical school movement is a

(01:39:19):
wonderful development. The really good classical schools are actually designed
around reading primary texts and help forcing kids not to
listen to our long lectures, but to have to synthesize
and articulate and analyze text. You can only be good
at that if you learn to read, you learn to
read deeply or able to synthesize, and you're able to
focus for a long periods of time. And so I

(01:39:42):
think that's how we renew the culture is by preserving
and renewing and recovering those habits which were just the
kind of basic thing that everybody got that was educated
until a century or two ago. It's easy to notice
all the stuff that's collapsing, and easy not to notice
these sort of pockets of light. We've been blessed to

(01:40:05):
have been part of several of those movements and so
seen what it does to kids. But honestly, think anyone
that's listening to us, that has kids or has grandkids,
if it's in your power, make sure that they have
those kinds of educational options. They need to know the
truths of the faith, truths of the creeds. They need
to know the scriptures like the back of their hand.

(01:40:26):
But they also need intellectual habits. They need discernment, they
need the ability to focus and to read and to
pay attention. Without those skills, none of this other stuff's
could work.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
As we're doing this podcast, we're in the midst of
an election cycle, and I've often said that the ballot
box is necessary. However, our culture is being determined by
far more than the ballot box. I mean, we have
the educational institutions, which are broken. We have the environmental
institutions which are corrupt. We have the entertainment industry which

(01:41:04):
is seducing our culture in many, many different ways. Talk
about that for a moment. I mean, this is really
where the battle is won or lost.

Speaker 2 (01:41:16):
It absolutely is. And as you know, I mean, I'm
here in Washington, D C. And I'm aware of how
much the so called deep state, but just the administrative
state which no one ever, no one ever elects, rules
and policies that are implemented by all of these agencies
in Washington, D C. And almost all the power is there.
But remember there was another time, about two thousand years ago,

(01:41:39):
the largest and most powerful empire Rome that spanned the
known world at the time. That was the moment in
which Christianity was born, and it was Christians were persecuted,
and yet they overcame it, and in fact eventually overtook it,
and so there's no reason that we cannot have the

(01:42:02):
same thing again. It's tempting if you have a narrow
time horizon, you might think, well, nothing like this has
ever happened. Actually, this is exactly how it started. We
at least have the benefit of two thousand years of
Christian history to draw on. But I do think that
we should think of ourselves much more like those early Christians,
and we should steal ourselves to be prepared to fight

(01:42:26):
and to suffer, just like those early Christians did, if
we want to be a part of transforming the world
with the Gospel, just as those early Christians did.

Speaker 1 (01:42:37):
I'm thinking as you're speaking about Jonathan Wells. I just
did a tribute to him and re aired one of
the podcasts I did with Jonathan Wells. You know, we
talked about suffering. You know, when you take the stands
that you take as an intellectual, as an educator, as
a commentator, as a writer, you do pay a price.

Speaker 2 (01:42:58):
Yeah, oh absolutely. I mean the reality is I was
talking to my younger daughter yesterday. We were talking about
these things, and I thought, and she realized this, She's
a senior in college now at the University of Dallas,
and she sort of realized, you know, if you were
going to play it safe, you would have taken the
opposite positions, all of your public positions, you should have
taken the other side. And we were trying to figure
out to go why is it that some people decide that, okay, well,

(01:43:20):
I'm going to pay the price? And I said, it
might be a neurodiversity. For all I know, we don't
care what people think about us, But it's also a
kind of matter of priority. Are we more interested in
the truth even as costly a Are we interested in
the approval of men and accolades. Jonathan Wells was someone
that lived his life for decades as someone that just

(01:43:43):
was willing to sacrifice for the truth. He did it
in his own way in the sixties, spent time in
the Citadel as a Vietnam War protester, and then it
ended up on the other side later politically and theologically.
But he was convinced that materialism and the Darwinian ideology
were a poison and a toxin to our culture, and

(01:44:05):
he was willing to dedicate the last decades of his
life to fighting it. And it's hard to see that
he's gone, but he lived a rich life in which
he was a stalwart defender of the truth as he
saw it.

Speaker 1 (01:44:18):
Yeah, and I love the way he did it. I
was listening through that podcast again myself before we re
aired it, and I asked him about a couple of
people who are very aerodyite, very sophisticated intellectuals, and I said,
how can they say this or that or the other thing?
And he basically pointed to what we're talking about right now.
He said, well, you know, if you don't say that,

(01:44:41):
you got to remember there is a huge price to
be paid.

Speaker 2 (01:44:45):
There absolutely is. And you know people think, oh, well,
of course in middle school, you know, there's a kind
of herd instinct for kids. But oh man, the academia
is absolutely terrible. And the truth of the matter is
is that we're all social creatures, were all tempted by
intellectual orthodoxies and social contagions, and we need to all

(01:45:05):
pray both for the discernment to be able to separate
the truth from falsehood, but also the bravery and will,
the courage to be willing to first see the truth
and then actually hold to it and to defend it,
even if it's costly to us.

Speaker 1 (01:45:21):
What's the anthropic principle and what's its relevance to what
we were talking about earlier when we're talking about mediocrity.

Speaker 2 (01:45:29):
Well, so the anthropic principle, the basic idea is that
you should expect to see conditions compatible with your existence. So,
in other words, if the conditions required for life are
very precise and narrow, then you shouldn't expect to find
yourself in just any old kind of circumstance. You should
expect to find yourself in those kind of narrow set

(01:45:51):
of conditions because there's no other If it were different,
you wouldn't be able to see yourself. So that's the
basic idea, is that you have to take account of
the it's kind of a selectfect. So if you need
to be around a yellow dwarf star in order to
be an organism, then that's where you're going to find yourself,
and so we have to take account of that when
we're when we're developing these arguments. On the other hand,

(01:46:13):
people will flip this and say, well, why is it
that we see these things, And they'll say, well, because
we had to see it this way, because if we
weren't in these environments, we wouldn't sort of see it.
But the question is that why do we observe a
local environment or a universe compatible with our existence? The
question is why does such a universe exist? That's the question.

(01:46:37):
We shouldn't be surprised, for instance, to discover that we're
in a habitable part of the galaxy, but why there
are galaxies with habitable regions, why those habitable regions are
also the best places for doing science. Those are the
questions that are actually interested in answering. And so people
will often use a kind of legitimate aspect of the
anthropic principle that yeah, take account of these selection effects

(01:46:59):
to try to blain away what is otherwise clear evidence
or designed and so that's a serious mistake. So, as
you know, we spend a lot of time in the
book just just slicing the blowny thinly enough so that
people see these differences.

Speaker 1 (01:47:13):
What are the ways you explain away the significance the
fine tuning of the universe is through the multiverse theory.
What's your take on that?

Speaker 2 (01:47:22):
That's the kind of main escape patch. So if you
get to a very strong evidence for very precise fine
tuning of the universe. Then somebody will say, well, maybe
the universe is kind of like just as we're around
one planet and there's lots of other planets, so yeah,
we're around, we're in a universe compatible with our existence.
But maybe there are an infinite number of different universes

(01:47:43):
and we of course just happen to be in this one.
So then you can say, so we shouldn't be surprised
to see the universe that's compatible with our existence, But
we also shouldn't be surprised because if there's an infinite
set of universes, then you know at least some of
them will be compatible with life. So what's happening here
is it's an illicit intellectual move because basically what you're

(01:48:04):
saying is something that looks like it's designed. This very
much looks like it's designed, but we're gonna we're going
to invoke sort of other opportunities for chance to operate
that we have no independent evidence of. So it'd be
like if I sold me flip a coin fifty times,
I need flipped fifty heads in a row, and I
only flipped it fifty times. He said, Okay, that's got

(01:48:27):
to be a trick. Coin, say no, because I mean,
you know, they're infinite number of universes and an infinite
number of people flipping coins someplace. Somebody's going to get
fifty heads in a row. Nobody would buy that, because
the much better explanation is that you've got a two
headed coin, or that you've cheated. In the same way,
interesting sort of invoking these things without evidence, and the

(01:48:48):
same way, we don't have any independent evidence that those
universes exist, so they're not anything like the evidence we
have of other planets. And so to me, it's just
quite clearly an attempt to explain away what would otherwise
be premaffacie evidence of design. And you know, in my
sense is that, look, if you've got to invoke an

(01:49:08):
infinite number of unobservable universes to explain the fine tuning
of this universe, that to me is a sign that
you're sort of there's something wrong with your worldview.

Speaker 1 (01:49:18):
You've lost the argument. Yeah, you know, so I got
to ask you about this Aliens, you know. I note,
I remember when Tucker Carson was on Fox, he used
to have segments on UFOs. Yes, and I noticed an
interview with former President Donald Trump. Maybe it would be
the next president. I don't know, but he was asked

(01:49:38):
about this question and he said, well, I really don't
believe in something to the effect. I don't really believe
in the UFOs, but some very smart people I know do.
What's your take on UFOs.

Speaker 2 (01:49:49):
Well, I mean, so there's two questions. The broader question
is is there life elsewhere in the universe, whether we
can detect it or not? Right, I just my answer
is always, we don't really know. God could have done
things a lot of different ways, so let's just sort
of be open to it. I don't think there's anything
wrong with a SETI researchers looking at radio signals, and
I think you could get an intelligent signal and we'd

(01:50:10):
be able to tell that would be interesting UFOs at
least as they're normally understood, or that these are sort
of advanced technologies of beings kind of like ourselves, coming
from other star systems and visiting us. Again, I mean, now,
based on our current knowledge of physics, it's not clear
how travel like that could would work. But I also

(01:50:30):
think it's possible there's some fundamental things we don't understand
yet that we'll discover later, And so I think that
we should just sort of be open to evidence, but
that we should also be discerning. And so it's even
if I mean, I think, I'll tell you this is
kind of where I am at the moment. I have
talked to people that have had alien abduction experiences. That is,

(01:50:52):
at least they explain it. What they believe happened is
that these aliens abducted them and conducted experiments on them
and then put them back in their beds or something
like this. And I've read a lot about this. This
is a very widely attested experience of people encountering having
an experience with other beings that can be quite negative.

(01:51:13):
But if you think about it, okay, that way of
describing these encounters is an artifact of the twentieth century,
when we started having ideas about, you know, spaceships and
little green men and things like that. But that might
simply be an interpretive grid of a spiritual encounter that
people have been having since time immemorial. And I can
tell you one woman I talked to at a conference,

(01:51:34):
I was absolutely convinced she believed she had been abducted.
I wasn't going to talk her out of it, being
aliens from another planet. But I had a very strong
feeling that what she had encountered was a was hostile
spiritual forces which she had was interpreting in this particular way.
And so I have a feeling that a lot of
these reports actually have something to do with that. And

(01:51:58):
because we have so stripped our cosmology and our understanding
of reality, so that maybe people have the idea that
there's a God, but we forget that there can also
be all the Bible talks about all sorts of other
spiritual beings that are part of God's created order, some
of which are good and some of which are bad.
And it's like that category has dropped out and the
only thing we have now is aliens on space ships

(01:52:19):
to account for these experiences. And I think, okay, yeah,
be open to the evidence for that one or the other.
I'm somewhat skeptical, but I think we also need to
realize that actually Christians have metaphysical resources for explaining a
lot of these experiences people have. And it may just
be that in a materialistic age, people are having encounters
of spiritual beings and they're interpreting them best they can

(01:52:43):
as aliens from another planet.

Speaker 1 (01:52:45):
What do you make of the hype in recent years
about uips and an aerial phenomenon really.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
Well, and so yeah, there's some There are some of
these cool video footage that the Navy has released of
weird things on radars, and I'm sure a lot of
folks listening have seen these videos. Now. Of course, if
they're aliens in spacecraft, that would be easy to confirm.

(01:53:12):
It's like Independence Day. If we get a spaceship right
over head here, we're going to know, Okay, there's aliens.
But it's always these kind of distant things that are
open to multiple interpretations. And so there are definitely some
weird things happening, but it's not at all this positive.
It's not nowhere near strong enough, I think, to persuade skeptics.

(01:53:32):
And at this point, I think I'm just skeptical enough
of the government that when they start releasing this stuff,
I'm thinking, what are they trying to distract us from?
It's like, what are they doing? And they want us
to start thinking about aliens and so again it's always
just like kind of right on the edge. And so
at least at the moment, we've not gotten any evidence

(01:53:54):
that I think would persuade a skeptic, nor should it.
So I just really do think that this is the
Stuff's just still an open question.

Speaker 1 (01:54:02):
So a lot of people are taking your book The
Privileged Planet and saying this book is a science stopper.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
Your response, well, it's weird to argue that a book
that argues that science itself is built into things, that
not just life, but scientific discovery is built into the
structure of the universe. How exactly that is a science stopper?
Anti science is a mystery to me because we're arguing

(01:54:31):
that science has an intrinsic dignity and value in the
scheme of things. But science ought to be about viewing
and analyzing and discovering the universe as it is and
following the evidence where it leads, not assuming ahead of
time that the universe can't point beyond itself. And I
think when people think, okay, well, any one that argues

(01:54:52):
that the universe had purpose, if they're saying that's anti science,
it's because they have confused science and it's right definition
with scientific materialism. But those are two different things.

Speaker 1 (01:55:07):
We talked a little earlier about reading, cultivating the art
and science of reading, the habit of reading. You talk
about cultivating the skill of reading the Book of Nature.
And that's really a big part of what you're talking
about when you talk about the privileged planet. You're talking
about the awe and the integrity that comes from learning

(01:55:32):
or cultivating the habit of reading the Book of Nature.

Speaker 2 (01:55:36):
That's right. And we talked about Psalm nineteen, the heavens
degory of the clear of the glory of God, and
of course Paul and Romans won. He says, from the
foundation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power
and divine nature have been clearly seen. That's a powerful client.
That's a strong claim that we can know clearly from
the things God has made something about his nature and

(01:55:58):
invisible qualities. Not just that all the universe looks like
it might be purposeful, but we actually can know something
about God. And this traditional theological idea that just as
there's a book of scripture, there's a book of nature.
Press that metaphor a little bit, well, what is a book? Well,
if you open a book, if you know how to
read a book, you don't attend to the text. It's

(01:56:20):
like if you're focusing on the font size or the
color of the ink, you're almost certainly not attending to
the meaning of the text. If you're reading a book,
those symbols become the means by which you read through
the text to the meaning of its author, so that
the intentions of the author are being transmitted to your
mind by way of this physical object. That's what it

(01:56:42):
means to read that kind of book in the same
way if we press the metaphor it. The book of
Nature is a book. We have to learn how to
read it. What are its symbols, what it's the language
in which it's written. But then if we've genuinely learned
to read it, we too should be able to read
through it to the intentions of its authors, so that
the world is not just something the kind of playpen

(01:57:03):
that God has created for us to live. It's actually
it's His general revelation of himself, and he leaves it
to us to learn to follow the clues and to
learn how to read it. But if we read it properly,
we will read through it and we will see that
it points beyond itself to Him.

Speaker 1 (01:57:21):
As we bring the podcast to a close, I want
to read something from your book and then ask you
to comment on it. And this is a step in
opening one's mind to an almost forgotten possibility. But this
is what you're right. Thus does our inquiry reduce to
a single question? Could this immense symphonic system of atoms, fields, forces, stars, galaxies, people,

(01:57:53):
and a planet called Earth has sprung not from some
inscrutable outworking of blindness, necessity, or an inexplicable accident, but
instead from a choice and a purpose. And if so,
then surely there could be evidence to suggest as much.

Speaker 2 (01:58:17):
Absolutely, that is our conclusion. Is our plea for people,
not that we don't want to bowl people over, but
if we're genuinely interested in the question of whether there's
purpose to the universe, if there's a God, the question
is that, okay, well, God needs to prove it to me.
The proper approach should be, how do I dispose myself

(01:58:40):
and open myself so that if there is a God
and there is a purpose to the world, I will
be able to see it. That's I think that the
true mark of wisdom in the twenty first century.

Speaker 1 (01:58:52):
Do you anticipate in a future, and I'm talking about
this in a specific sense, any future discoveries in astronomy
that might significantly your hypothesis or the privileged planet.

Speaker 2 (01:59:03):
Yeah, I mean, the next generation of telescopes we hope
will help us enable us to be able to detect
Earth size planets. We're not quite there yet. Germo is
actually working in industry actually in that area. Now, we're
not there yet, but I mean that's going to bear
very directly on our argument. We'll detect probably tens of

(01:59:25):
thousands of extra solar planets and we hope eventually earth
size planets, and so that's going to kind of narrow
the field and winnow the possibilities, and so we hope
maybe in ten years or fifteen years we'll be able
to give some really specific numbers to these things, where
at the moment it's just kind of why the airbars
of both sides.

Speaker 1 (01:59:44):
I wanted to help me to do something as we
close the podcast, and that is convince people to get
a copy of the book and maybe some advice on
how to use the book. I mean a lot of
people look at the book this big and say this
is beyond my ability. You know, I may have said
this many years ago, but this book is actually enjoyable

(02:00:04):
to read. Talk about how you can best facilitate using
this book.

Speaker 2 (02:00:11):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean I think it is a good book,
often for book clubs in which you take a chapter
a week or a month for a lot of people
that of course, lots of science people have no problem
with it. But you can also watch the documentary back
in two thousand and four, I mean, we look a
lot younger. You can find it actually free online. I

(02:00:33):
think it's also on Netflix and Amazon, which a you know,
fifty nine minute summary of the argument. But honestly, anyone
that's listened to our conversation is going to get the
gist of the book. But the book itself is where
the details are. If people wonder why it's expensive or
why it's so thick and part, it's because it's packed
with illustrations and figures, and they are also twenty pages

(02:00:56):
of color plates in it. But we wanted there to be,
you know, it to be one place where all of
these arguments could be found. And we're just really thankful
for the publisher to allow us to do that, because
you know, it's hard these days to persuade a publisher
to put lots of illustrations about especially color illustrations in
a book. But we're really pleased with the way it

(02:01:16):
turned out.

Speaker 1 (02:01:17):
Again, It is a fantastic book, as the twentieth anniversary
edition of the Privileged Planet. How Our Place in the
Cosmos is designed for discovery, and it is available for
all of those who stand shoulder to shoulder with us
in the battle for life and truth in gear, copy
on the web and equipped dot org, equip dot org,

(02:01:38):
or you can write me at Post Office Box eighty
five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code two eight two
seven one. Again, when you listen to the podcast, you
are going to be blessed in so many ways because
the people that I interview are interesting and formative and inspirational,
and you're the quintessential example of that. I so appreciate you.

(02:02:02):
Thanks so much for the contributions you're making. Your life
is making a difference for not only time, but for eternity.

Speaker 2 (02:02:10):
Thanks so much, Hanks. I'm good to be with you.

Speaker 1 (02:02:11):
Yeah, it was great to be with you as well.
And if you enjoy the podcast, subscribe rate review. It
helps a lot. Thanks for tuning in to this edition
of the hank Um Plug Podcast. Look forward to seeing
you next time with more

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery

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The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery

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