Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson declared, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity it’s trying to kill us.” When astronomers look out to the universe, some are struck by all the dangers it poses to life, especially to human life. In every region of the cosmos beyond Earth, they see gravitational disturbances, supernova, gamma-ray bursts…asteroids, comets, and solar and stellar flares that can easily destroy us.
This dark, doomsday perspective perspective makes sense for astronomers and others who’ve embraced the beliefs expressed by their predecessor Carl Sagan. His message — that the universe is all there is or was or ever will be — shapes their perspective…
What if all that appears so deadly and dangerous is actually what makes life, especially human life and its flourishing, possible? What if the cosmos is not all there is or was or ever will be? Such a perspective would alter the significance of everything about it and within it. – Dr. Hugh Ross, astronomer
When astronomer Hugh Ross first began writing about anthropocentric or theological science in 1991, many were surprised the universe appeared designed for Earth to exist. Not just Earth —but only Earth — and the human life on it. This was contrary to the alleged “great demotion” of humanity’s place in the cosmos, as naturalism evangelists like Carl Sagan preached. Some probably thought science would prove Ross wrong.
It didn’t.
In fact, the years since have become a golden age of astronomy. Discovery after discovery pointed to Earth’s uniqueness, but more importantly, that everything about the structure of the universe prefaced the coming of humans.
Ross has previously documented this growing body of evidence in books like Why the Universe the Way it Is, and Improbable Planet. His new Designed to the Core continues pulling this research together — and this is cutting edge science from around the world.
It’s the implications, however, that should give the chaotic peoples of this world pause. What if there was truly purpose to this existence? What if the reason no aliens have been discovered — and the constants of physics continue to rule out billions of worlds — is because Earth was the point of the universe’s coming into being?
As biologist Michael Denton writes in is recent book, The Miracle of Man, some may disagree with these conclusions, but the science is not in dispute. Those who disagree do from a place of philosophical bias, not a scientific one.
Why cling to a depressing view of the universe, where nothing ultimately matters, where chance decides everything, if the evidence points elsewhere?
Materialistic naturalistic philosophies have infected many fields. They have handcuffed science. Humanity doesn’t matter, if you follow these beliefs to their logical conclusion. Yet lives of millions contradict this every day, and like never before, so do the heavens.
From distant galaxies, to the Sun, and Earth itself; from the instant of the Big Bang, to the quantum and the atomic, it all has fingerprints of being designed to the core.
Darrick Dean 