Gonzolez and Richards Chapter Six

I hope you get up every morning and ask yourself: “Why do I do what I do?” Without taking yourself too seriously, do you take what you do very seriously? Hopefully, you are one of those who does all that he or she does for God’s glory . . . under His watchful eye, as it were . . . to be noticed by Him. Once upon a time, my pastor boasted that his was the best job in the world. My first thought? Not by half: I’ve got hundreds of my students and former students out there thinking live and very relevant thoughts in front of tens of thousands of people several times a week. It is a privilege, an honor and an awesome responsibility simply to teach something as common as biblical literature. That is my job; that is what I do; that is what I am. But, there is a humility that comes with it: some students can completely derail a lecture, a text, a tradition, with a well articulated question or comment. Any of us with any integrity and intellectual acumen will retreat to our offices and regroup and rethink our positions. Unlike many of my instructors that would never give a student credit for sentience much less an idea, I always try to footnote my ideas with the brilliant – or lucky! – student that happened upon “the right answer.” None of us thinks in vacuum. Every now and again, we all have to come out and make a public pronouncement after which there may be public or private comments or questions. Thinking is a process and nobody has a corner on the market.

I once heard of a debate between someone of the guild of scientism and John Feinberg. As I recall, it was reported during my doctoral course in Philosophy and Theology studying under the latter. Because I’ve already used the “scientist” as a whipping boy before, I’ll forego the opportunity to expose someone out of his depth. At one point in the debate the scientist pointed out that Dr. Feinberg, the author of what I consider one of the top 20 most important books ever written,[1] was not a scientist, not part of the guild, the elite, the gnostic inner-circle, as it were. To which Dr. Feinberg replied, rather tersely, “Bad thinking is bad thinking, wherever you find it.” My thought is that if someone with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Analytical Philosophy accuses you of bad thinking, there are two possible responses: defensiveness or reflection. I would choose the latter. Unfortunately, the “scientist” chose the former.

So why bother with Gonzalez and Richards? Probably most of us that read and discuss these things will never be in the guild. The answer is simple: unless ideas batted around in the study of cosmology become facile in the church, we will ever be crippled in our understanding of beginnings. We need to move smoothly between the ideas of the secularists, the creationists and the intelligent design people so that we can evaluate and synthesize these ideas for the benefit of the church. Wittingly or unwittingly, we live under the rule of a magnificent God – one who created everything from the smallest quark to the farthest quasar. In the study of His creation, everyone has something to bring to the table. Enjoy the feast!

Assumptions and implications are not the same thing.

Now on to chapter 6 of Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: The chapter is entitled “Our Helpful Neighbors.” Once there was an evening, remarkable for being clear as a bell here in the Puget Sound area, and the moon was a little less than full. It became abundantly clear to me that there are a couple of options: “Copernican” or “Ptolemaic.” That is, either we live in a solarocentric system, or we live in a geocentric system and from that, the official story goes that either the earth is spherical or the earth is flat respectively. As we will see when we get to chapter 11, the “Official Story” and historical fact are somewhat divorced. Be that as it may, when we look at the moon there are a couple of things we might intuit: either the moon is spherical or it is a disk. I am reminded of the many novels by Terry Pratchett about “Discworld.” Pratchett has a complete calculus and physics surrounding the possibility of life on Discworld and the adventures thereupon. Proof that literature need have no correspondence to reality to create a universe of its own, inform and entertain. . . . Well, from the sublime to the ridiculous. . . .

It kind of poisons the sample to look at the moon from our modernist standpoint: we know the thing is roughly spherical and although I’d personally love to join “The Flat Earth Society,” we all know that the third rock from the sun, the place upon which we live, is a Pale Blue Ball. But now throw yourself back in time – if you can throw yourself at Discworld, certainly you can go back to Medieval times or to Antiquity. If you didn’t know better, what would you think when you looked up? Without modern equipment or optics, how would you ascertain what you theorize to be the case? All you have is what you can see and what you can measure, including the passage of time.

From the Tycho Brahe’s naked-eye observations of the motions of the planets against the background of the stars, Johannes Kepler was able to formulate his “Third Law of planetary motion” (the square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the Sun). From Kepler’s three laws, Newton was able to advance the discussion of more general laws on gravity and motion. From Newton’s laws, Einstein was able to develop his General Theory of Relativity (pp. 104-5). When we developed the equipment to more precisely examine solar eclipses and the bending of light around the sun, we were able to demonstrate a certain physical reality in regard to the General Theory of Relativity. All that from just looking up!

The point the authors make from all this is that because we are on a fairly stable platform, we can make some relatively safe observations and from that some marginally accurate calculations. Truth be told, we wouldn’t want to calculate a trip to the moon or Mars based on their arithmetic; but the fact that they were playing in the right ballpark ought to give us pause. They did this without telescopes, microwaves, lasers and such.

Let us remove the stability one level: supposing that instead of living on earth, the Moon was the habitable sphere in the system. You can probably see how the physics and math are complicated one more degree. Instead of merely circumnavigating the solar orb once a year and trying to figure out the 8 minute precession (rises earlier each night) of the moon, we would have to figure out why the earth (from the Moon, remember) and the sun both moved around the way they do and develop a theory that the sun was the more stationary of the three. Wow! Would that be confusing or what?!

One more step: imagine that our stable platform was beset with more eccentric motion than it is (for instance both center points of the earth’s elliptical orbit are inside the Sun). Imagine that chaos theory took over a few decimals to the left of where it now does. It would be nearly impossible to make any reliable (repeatable) observations and hence the conclusions drawn from them would be less valid than they are from the platform we have. “For Kepler to formulate his laws, it helped that neither the orientation of Earth’s axis nor the orbits of the planets exhibit observable chaos over a human lifetime” (pp. 105-6). Besides that, as we have seen from earlier chapters, the nights would be hotter and colder and the skies would be clearer and cloudier – depending upon where our erratic motion took us visa vis the Sun. What a mathematical and atmospheric mess!

As it turns out and once again: the best observatory in the universe is also the best place around to live. The authors compare and contrast this with other worlds orbiting the Sun and orbiting the Gas Giants. We have the best spot all around. Here are some more thoughts about the relationship between the Earth and the Moon:

. . . if the Moon were much larger and induced stronger tides, it would have slowed Earth’s rotation more quickly, perhaps synchronizing them by now. Earth’s day would be the same length as its month, leading to large day-night temperature disparities and perhaps endangering the preservation of ice deposits. The Moon would loom larger than the Sun, and the overall tides would be weaker, since only the Sun would induce changing tides on Earth. Greater stability, then, doesn’t simply and automatically make a place more habitable and measurable.

The relationship between Earth and its Moon is so intimate that it’s probably best not to think of Earth as a lone planet, but as the habitable member of the Earth-Moon system.

This partnership not only makes our existence possible, it also provides us with scientific knowledge we might otherwise lack (pp. 107-08).

The authors then catalogue some early attempts at measurement and their mistakes. For instance: in 200 B.C. when Eratosthenes attempted to calculate the circumference of the Earth he was off about 16% - not bad for then. He thought that the circumference was about 29 thousand miles when it is about 25 thousand. Hipparchus, working from the total solar eclipse of March 14, 189 B.C. “. . . estimated a lunar distance of about seventy-five Earth radii from us, not far from the modern value of sixty Earth radii” (p. 112). On the other hand: Aristarchus in the early 3^rd Century B.C. “. . . estimated the Sun to be about twenty times as far as the Moon: today, we know the value is 390.” Problem? Precision! “An observer would have to measure the angle between the Sun and Moon to within eight minutes of arc to get a useful distance” (p. 112). He simply couldn’t shave his measurements as finely as we can with modern instrumentation.

The authors then discuss the fact that the planets act like bombing ranges for us. A lot of the extraterrestrial space-junque gets absorbed by other planets (and the Sun) and so usually only the small stuff hits us. This is useful! We needn’t be like Chicken Little and have to be looking up all the time. . . . And yet, enough of the small stuff hits us so as to give us information from beyond our immediate locale.

The same processes that form a planetary system also leave surplus asteroids and comets. A terrestrial planet with protective planetary neighbors is preferable to one in isolation around its host star. Too many planets, however, will make a system less stable. The most habitable and measurable system will be one with the most planets allowed by stability constraints. It appears that Earth belongs to such a system. Who knows what other peculiar features of our Solar System contribute to Earth’s habitability? These await future research and discovery (p. 115).

Now that we can look away from here (either by telescope or by space-probe), we are learning things about the things that have bombarded them that we didn’t have to experience! I’ll let them have the last word:

We’re only now beginning to appreciate how much our Solar System’s configuration is not only rare but also surprisingly crucial for life and scientific discovery. It has indeed

been a perspicacious teacher. Given the recent trends in the planetary sciences, perhaps we should begin to view Earth and its immediate surroundings not as a carbon copy of

systems bound to arise wherever stars and planets form, but as a finely tuned and interdependent system that together nurtures a strange little oasis. Like the baby bear’s porridge, Earth is, once again, just right (p. 116).

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