Selected Comments on Chapter 7 of Mr. Lee Strobel’s “The Case For a Creator”
‘The Evidence of Astronomy’
Page 156: The book “Rare Earth” by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee is mentioned again. Nothing far-fetched in Darwinian evolution about their claim that multicellular life is rare, microbial life and lesser life is relatively more plentiful, and intelligent life even rarer (possibly non-existent outside our Earth in our Universe).
The question still arises, ‘if there is an external supernatural Creator, why has this being left all the immensity of, especially our universe and also the infinitely many other universes with at most microbial life? The amount of our Universe alone that can be seen is very minute compared to the amount that is beyond the 14 billion light years in all direction from us that light has traveled since the Big Bang. Why would an Intelligent Designer hide, essentially forever, all this from the rare special humans? — it would take trillions of years before light from these large distances to reach us — also, recent astronomical data shows that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, so our observable universe will become smaller and smaller.
It is very difficult to believe that all this unobservable time and space just is there to amaze and teach us.
Check how much of the universe is presently unobservable. Click
Page 158: “Going far back into time, Christians have reached a far different conclusion: Earth was created by God as the stage upon which human drama would be played out. What’s amazing about modern science, …”
Nothing amazing at all — all ancient myths assume that God(s) made the Earth as a staging ground for the ‘human drama to play out’.
Page 163: “Even the ancient Greeks knew it was a sphere.”
How come the Bible writers didn’t know it? Click.
Page 174: “In addition, the planets in our inner solar system protected us from getting bombarded by asteroids from the asteroid belt. … If you want to get an idea of the stuff that probably would hit the Earth, look at the surface of the moon. The moon, unfortunately, has too little surface area to provide much protection, but it’s a nice record.”
The Earth was not spared. The meteor hits on Earth would be proportional to that of the moon. Some big ones hit the Earth — look at the large meteor that hit Earth 65 million years ago and destroyed all the dinosaurs, including 50% of all marine genera. Measurement evidence is accumulating that the mass extinction 250 million years ago was caused by an asteroid where 90% of all species died without any descendents. Earth was not and is not immune to an asteroid catastrophe.
Some Old Earth Creationists claim that God destroyed life to create new life every so often as shown by the mass extinctions in the fossil record — there was more than one creation of life. Question to them — why would God destroy only some species and not others? Why didn’t this God start each time with a clean slate? Does this God experiment with different species? Is this God actually like us, having limited knowledge about reality, and must experiment to find what this reality is?
Page 178: “Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century astronomer who fanned the flames of the Copernican Revolution, gazed at the moon and believed he discerned caves that were populated by moon people.”
A number of the scientists in the 1500’s, 1600’s, 1700’s and 1800’s were Bible believers that believed that there was intelligent life on the moon and on other heavenly bodies. Many of these scientists including Kepler and Newton believed in astrology and Bible prophecy as well. They can’t be blamed for this; they were just ignorant on a lot of issues that we are not.
Page 190 and rest of Chapter 7: But if the universe was designed with us in mind … (the anthropic principle)
The late Physicist Heinz Pagels was once impressed with the anthropic principle but eventually lost interest because it had no predictive power. The theory is not testable, nor is there any way to extract new information from it. Instead, it yields an endless stream of empty tautologies — we are here because we are here.
Astronomy does not prove a supernatural Creator exists.
We have only one example of life and the assessment of probability of life is uncertain at best — every planet in the universe will have some special things about it.
O. Hooge
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Naturalism and Religious Experience 